Life in the Lab: Working with malaria parasites

Alena Pance is a senior staff scientist in the malaria group at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. In this film she introduces malaria as a parasitic disease and describes how to work safely in the lab with malaria parasites including culturing them using human blood and preparing them on microscope slides.
The Malaria programme uses a variety of different research methods to understand the biology of the Plasmodium parasite, its mosquito vector and the human host. This scientific approach aims to find solutions to malaria control such as discovering new drugs and vaccines.

This is one of a series of Life in the lab films providing a more in-depth insight to some of the laboratory processes used by different teams at the Wellcome Sanger Institute. The film has been developed to help support the OCR Cambridge Technical Level 3 in laboratory skills.