Protein Structures Related to Diseases

Malaria continues to be a major cause of morbidity and mortality throughout the world. Our laboratory uses multi-disciplinary techniques within modern biology - including biochemistry, bioinformatics, cell biology, parasitology and protein crystallography to unravel the mechanism of action of important parasite proteins. Over the past few years, we have made significant progress in understanding various parasite motors involved in protein translation machinery. We have also explored structure-based inhibitor discovery routines against several malaria parasite targets. We will explore examples from our studies that highlight attributes of malaria proteins that can be exploited for discovering new inhibitors.