Scientists have known about the parasite's housebreaking habit for a decade, but just how it breaks in to blood cells has been unknown.

Now, an international team of scientists, led by Walter and Eliza Hall Institute's Professor Alan Cowman, have discovered that the gene - known as PfRh4 - that the parasite uses as a tool to switch between potential invasion points. More specifically, the gene provides the parasite with the ability to switch from receptors on red blood cells that contain sialic acid to those that do not.

In effect, if the gene finds all the doors locked, then it will try all the windows until it finds one it can force open.

The team who performed the research work consisted of Janine Stubbs, Ken Simpson, Tony Triglia, David Plouffe, Christopher J. Tonkin, Manoj T. Duraisingh, Alexander G. Maier and Elizabeth Winzeler. Professor Cowman and his team at WEHI worked with researchers from the Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) in La Jolla, California and the Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation in San Diego, California.

This discovery made by the group will have a profound impact upon the design of new anti-malarial vaccines, since the inactivation of this single protein could block multiple entry points currently open to the parasite.

Professor Cowman is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute international research scholar. The results of the new study are published in the 26 August 2005 issue of the prestigious journal, Science.

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"The possibility that insulin may participate in its own regulation is intriguing, and adds to the growing evidence relating G-quartet formation and diabetes," she says. She plans to apply her technique to G-quartet-forming sequences that occur in other regions of human chromosomes and have been implicated in cancer, aging, and genetic diseases. Her goal is to increase understanding of the role of G-quartets in health and disease, leading to the identification of new biomarkers and medical therapies.

McGown is one of 18 Rensselaer researchers presenting at the ACS meeting in Washington, along with Rensselaer President Shirley Ann Jackson, who will be speaking at a special event celebrating the 10th anniversary of the ACS Scholars Program. Her talk will focus on the urgent need to build the next generation of scientists, which she asserts requires fostering a national plan and a national will to succeed.

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