Developing and refining methods of analysing malaria genetic data obtained from infected human blood samples.

在许多发展中国家，抗药性疟疾的传播是对人类健康的一大威胁。只要我们知道导致耐药性的突变(在许多情况下是正确的)，就可以对耐药性进行跟踪和量化，这些数据构成了许多旨在确保继续提供有效药物的关键遗传监测方案的基础。原则上，必要的疟疾遗传数据可以通过分析受感染的人类血液样本获得，但人们往往同时感染几个疟疾克隆，这使得无法清楚地确定任何单个克隆的基因构成。我们提出了一项研究计划，以开发和改进适当的方法，以克服数据解释的这些问题，允许高质量的耐药频率基因数据为公共卫生政策提供信息。这些分析方法在了解疟疾传播的遗传流行病学方面也有更广泛的应用。

The spread of drug resistant malaria is a potent threat to human health in much of the developing world. Resistance can be tracked and quantified provided we know the mutations responsible for resistance (true in many cases) and these data form the basis for many key genetic surveillance programmes aimed at ensuring the continued provision of effective drugs. The requisite malaria genetic data can, in principle, be obtained from analysing infected human blood samples but people are often simultaneously infected by several malaria clones and this makes it impossible to clearly identify the genetic composition of any single clone. We propose a program of research to develop and refine suitable methodologies that can overcome these problems of data interpretation allowing good quality genetic data on the frequency of drug resistance to inform public health policy. These methods of analysis also have more general application in understanding the genetic epidemiology of malaria transmission.