Taylor Lab
Principal Investigator: Steve Myer Taylor
Institution: Duke University (Durham, NC)
Primary Subfield: Immunology
Recruitment Status: ✅ Accepting PhD Students ✅ Hiring Postdocs
Research Focus
Project Abstract Sickle-trait hemoglobin confers near complete protection from severe, life-threatening Plasmodium falciparum malaria in African children. The mechanisms of this protection remain incompletely understood, but several lines of evidence support the notion that sickle-trait attenuates the critical parasite pathogenic phenotype of cytoadherence. We have reported conserved parasite transcriptional programs in sickle-trait RBCs, supporting a mechanism of this attenuated cytoadhesion that is primarily post-transcriptional. This hypothesis was augmented by the observation that some P. falciparum parasites appear to have adapted to infect sickle-trait RBCs through modulation of the gene PF3D7_1127000, encoding a putative protein phosphatase. In our recent parasite comparative transcriptomic study in Malian children, PF3D7_1127000 was the single most overexpressed transcript in sickle-trait children at over 30-fold. In an orthogonal parasite genome-wide screen, we observed this gene as enriched in children with sickle-trait coding mutations and identified a structural rearrangement in PF3D7_1127000 (aka “Pfsa3”). Collectively, these data suggest that a variant linked to overe…
Active NIH Awards
- 1R01AI192712-01A1: PARSEC: Plasmodium falciparum Adaptive Response to Sickle trait Erythrocytes (2026)
- 5U01AI162463-05: Improving Neonatal health Through Rapid malaria testing in Early Pregnancy with high-sensitivity Diagnostics (INTREPiD) (2026)
- 3U01AI162463-05S2: Improving Neonatal health Through Rapid malaria testing in Early Pregnancy with high-sensitivity Diagnostics (INTREPiD) (2026)
- 3U01AI162463-05S1: Improving Neonatal health Through Rapid malaria testing in Early Pregnancy with high-sensitivity Diagnostics (INTREPiD) (2026)
- 5U01AI162463-04: Improving Neonatal health Through Rapid malaria testing in Early Pregnancy with high-sensitivity Diagnostics (INTREPiD) (2025)
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