Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute
The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute is an internationally-renowned genome research center located on the Wellcome Trust Genome Campus in Hinxton, near Cambridge, UK.
Sanger is well known for its key role in the Human and Malaria Genome Projects, which produced the first complete sequence of the human and Plasmodium falciparum genomes respectively.
The Sanger Malaria Programme is now a flagship endeavor at the Institute. Malaria research activities have expanded considerably from ‘simply’ sequencing a single parasite, but continue to build on the initial parasite and human DNA sequences to better understand the factors in both genomes that contribute to disease. Today the overarching goal of the Sanger Malaria Programme is to discover critical molecular mechanisms underlying malaria biology and disease, by understanding the phenotypic consequences of natural and experimental genetic variation in parasite and the host.
In a consolidated effort, Dominic Kwiatkowski's team works between Oxford University and the Sanger Institute to find and use natural variation in the genomes of the host and parasite to understand complex malaria phenotypes, such as why some people are naturally resistant to disease, and how some parasites become resistant to antimalarial drugs. These projects leverage Sanger’s core strengths in large scale, high-throughput genotyping and resequencing, and are backed by the informatic, statistical, and biological expertise required to handle, analyze, and interpret the massive data sets they generate.
Cutting-edge genotyping and resequencing technologies are central to MalariaGEN’s mission to use natural variation in the human genome to learn how protective immunity against malaria works. Many people within the Kwiatkowski group (and indeed across the Sanger Institute) are involved in various aspects of the long process by which DNA samples from malaria-endemic regions are transformed into genomic data and analyzed for novel insights about the pathogenesis of this disease in different genetic populations. The Kwiatkowski group at Sanger includes expertise in malaria biology, bioinformatics, informatics, and statistics. Find out more about the Sanger team members and their contributions to MalariaGEN below.
People
- Daniel Alcock
- Sarah Auburn
- Susana Campino
- Taane Clark
- Jacob Almagro Garcia
- Katja Kivinen
- Dominic Kwiatkowski
- Bronwyn MacInnis
- Magnus Manske
- Gareth Maslen
- Elilan Somaskantharajah