Human babesiosis in Europe is mainly caused by Babesia divergens, which is also a zoonosis, but there is very little known about this important parasite. We have isolated, cultured and sequenced two new isolates of B. divergens. A student in this project is required to carry out a comprehensive genomic comparison of these isolates to identify unique gene duplication events, variations, evolution etc. The candidate is also expected to determine preferential expression of genes of interest using available RNA-seq data. Bioinformatics tools such blast, orthofinder, funAnnotate, baseSpace and others will be used so some experience using UNIX, python and R is an advantage.
This project will be supervised by Muyideen Tijani in Kristina Persson’s group/lab
Contact: muyideen_kolapo.tijani@med.lu.se