Contact: Jim Laird
STARKVILLE, Miss.--A Mississippi State University faculty member's collaboration with a National Academy of Sciences ecologist is providing new insight into how one of the world's most persistent pathogens works.
Diana Outlaw, an assistant professor in the Department of Biological Sciences, came to Mississippi State in 2009, and it's been a perfect fit, she said.
"I'm a product of state universities," Outlaw explained.
The native Californian picked biology as her undergraduate major because she'd always wanted to be a veterinarian. Along the way, Outlaw fell in love with evolutionary biology and finished her doctorate at the University of Memphis.
As a postdoctoral research associate on a National Science Foundation-funded project, Outlaw worked with principal investigator Robert Ricklefs of the University of Missouri-St. Louis to estimate how old the lineages of malaria parasites are. The journal Science featured their findings in an issue published recently.
"Malaria parasites are a serious problem in many parts of the world. As scientists, we want to understand how humans and other vertebrates came to acquire the parasites and when they did so," she said. "We can now do that with the 'clock' that we developed for this paper."
According to Outlaw, their results suggest that humans acquired malaria long ago in their evolutionary history--about 2.5 million years--and that malaria parasites have switched hosts throughout their history leading to, among many others, the parasites' infection of humans.
Outlaw said the research findings provide a cautionary tale for the widespread mosquito-borne disease, which is estimated by the World Health Organization to cause 250 million cases a year and nearly one million deaths around the world annually.
"Host switching has been a primary mechanism for the diversification of parasites throughout their evolution. Although it's somewhat speculative, malaria probably did not become a serious problem for human populations until they became more dense, and as we alter the environment and deplete our resources, we are creating opportunities for parasites and other diseases to move to new hosts," she said.
Currently, Outlaw and a colleague at Texas A&M University are working with researchers across Africa to develop research collections and programs--creating important connections, she said.
"Our international partnerships help African researchers with limited funds, uncover previously undocumented biodiversity, and take research expertise and money into the nations suffering the most from malaria," she said.
Outlaw is also working with Mississippi State students on a malaria study, and expects to have data to publish starting this fall.