The DNA insect swat

Malaria parasites carried by mosquitoes undergo gene mutations that can make them drug-resistant. Here's how doctors are crowdsourcing the fightback The latest anti-malaria weapon is not a drug -- it's data.



If you can sequence the genomes of thousands of malaria parasites and of the Anopheles mosquitoes that carry them, you can spot genetic mutations that can cause drug and insecticide resistance. Better still, if you build a spot such changes -- doctors compare notes can alter local strategies to keep existing drugs effective.

That's what the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge and Bangkok's Mahidol-Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit are doing. For the past few months, Sanger has been sequencing DNA extracted from blood belonging to malaria patients around the world. The Cambridge institute combines each sample's genetic information with related metadata (such as its origin). That's a lot of data: a single sample of the malaria parasite contains 23 million nucleotides to map, and already some 200 samples have been sequenced.