Working with some excellent Ethiopian collaborators and in particular Pascale Kropf at Imperial college, London, we are using parasite genetics and RNA-seq of clinical samples to understand the pathogenesis and epidemiology of leishmaniasis in Ethiopia.
I led the Sanger Institute involvement in the first reference genome for Haemonchus contortus. Haemonchus is widely used as a model in research on anti-nematode anthelminthics, so it was natural to try and use this resource to try and understand the genetic basis of anthelmintihcs resistance.
I was involved in the earliest work on the genomics of Leishmania populations, and with a range of collaborators have published on Leishmania populations in the Indian subcontinent, East Africa and South America, and recently the first global picture of the Leishmania donovani species complex.
I was involved in attempts to provide genetic evidence to support the Guinea worm eradication program. I was initially asked whether we could show genetically that the worms then appearing in dog infections in Chad were the same - Dracunculus medinensis - as those causing human cases.
My first involvement in parasitology was through leading reference genome sequencing, assembly and annotation projects for a number of key helminth species of medical and veterinary importance. This inlucdes the nematodes Haemonchus contortus, Globodera pallida and Onchocerca volvulus.
Roz Laing, Jenni McIntyre and I have recently been awarded BBSRC funding for a project with Stew Burgess and Al Nisbet and colleagues at the Moredun Research Institute and Jack Hearn at SRUC to study ivermectin resistance in sheep scab mites (Psoroptes ovis), using a combination of bulked segregant analysis and population genomics approaches.
I’ve worked on Cryptosporidium genomics in collaboration with Carol Gilchrist and Bill Petri at the University of Virginia and their colleagues at ICDDR,B in Dhaka to generate some genomic data from a cohort of Bangaldesh children with diarrhoeal disease.