Malaria

http://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/

Checking the Rosetta At Home website today (no new data supplied recently !)  and I got to reading. . . my very own version of the 'time sink'. . . .   and I got to thinking:   Malaria and it's pesky mosquito link are so ubiquitous. . .   there MUST be a purpose in nature for this disease.  The active attacks of malaria - do they heat the body to repel some other threat?  Are the painful joints telling you something about your body you should be addressing/amending?  And of course,  somewhere in the biosphere/living planet/Gaia there is a cure for this and associated trail of body imbalances.


May 18, 2011
Journal post from David Baker

A recent issue of Nature describes an exciting approach we are taking with collaborators to fight Malaria. The title of the paper is "A synthetic homing endonuclease-based gene drive system in the human malaria mosquito" and the PDF is available at my lab web site. The idea is to use enzymes which cut within critical genes in mosquitos to greatly reduce the number of malaria parasite infected mosquitos. There are still many issues that must be overcome for this strategy to be used against malaria in the real world, but this paper is an important first proof of concept of the strategy.