evolutionary genomics of Leishmania

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. A particular interest has been in understanding the basic pattern and process of gene flow in these populations, which is complex due to the combination of facultative, but probably rare, sexual reproduction, extensive inbreeding and pervasive aneuploidy variation. We have also been involved in developing an approach to directly sequence Leishmania genomes from clinical tissue samples, avoiding the need to culture parasites in vitro.