Sarah Auburn

Sarah is a postdoctoral scientist at the Sanger Institute. During her PhD at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics in Oxford, Sarah focused on host (human) genetic epidemiology of severe malaria. At Sanger she branched into the field of parasite genetics, and plans to use her background knowledge of both host and parasite genetics to investigate host-parasite interactions that may be important in malaria pathogenesis.

At present, Sarah's key role is in the development and maintenance of a resource of parasites for the Plasmodium Genome Variation project, which aims to describe the genetic variation between malaria parasites from across the globe using high throughput genome resequencing. This role entails working closely with collaborators in malaria-endemic countries, establishing adapted parasite culture lines from numerous geographic locations, and optimizing methods for obtaining suitably human-free parasite DNA samples collected directly from patients in the field. In addition to the parasite resource, Sarah is also involved in the analysis of the sequence data generated in this project. In future, she plans to use functional biological assays to investigate interesting new variants arising from the project which may be important determinants of malaria pathogenesis.