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Jill Chmielewski is a PhD candidate at the University of Adelaide who works on Plasmodium knowlesi a zoonotic malaria parasite species which has been adapted to culture and is amenable to gene editing. Jill’s research utilises CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing to determine the function of merozoite surface proteins 4 and 5 in Plasmodium knowlesi, and how it differs from the foremost human species P. falciparum. Another prominent human malaria parasite, P. vivax, has yet to be adapted to long term in vitro culture. This creates a challenge in solidifying antigen candidates for vaccine development. Jill has gene-edited P. knowlesi to express P. vivax MSPs in order to determine the importance of these antigens for development of immunity to P. vivax malaria.
Xavier Barton is a PhD student at Murdoch University in the Cryptick Lab and the Harry Butler Institute researching the ecology of ticks. Xavier is interested in how they move through a landscape and how different environmental factors effect how they move. He will be presenting “Parasitic Landscapes: An Infesting View” discussing his project on tick populations genetics and his iNaturalist project https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/tick-exploration/journal
