Early stages of the malaria parasite inside the mosquito

23.01.2023, 13:00  –  Campus Golm, Haus 9, Raum 2.22
Forschungsseminar Wahrscheinlichkeitstheorie

Dr. Angelo Valleriani (Max-Planck-Inst. of Colloids and Interfaces, Dept of Biomaterials, Potsdam)

The malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum is ingested by the mosquito of the species Anophele, when
the mosquito gets a blood meal from an infected host. Inside the mosquito, the parasite's first 24 hours
show a set of genetic and morphological transformations in order to escape the deadly environment of the
mosquito gut during blood digestion. The group of E. Levashina at the MPI for Infection Biology in Berlin
has produced fascinating, quantitative experimental data of this process, which seems to be one of the
weakest points of the parasite's life cycle. In this talk I will describe this process, show the data and discuss
some of their peculiar features in terms of statistics modeling. Furthermore, I will discuss a mathematical
model that recapitulates this process, served as guideline for further experimental observations and pro-
duces the time distributions involved in the process. These distributions are the first quantitative estimate of this process and will serve as a ruler to make comparative experiments under various environmental and biological conditions.

The Zoom-access data are available under FS_22-23