Sadly enough, the one thing that made this miserable excuse for a week bearable was a lecture on Plasmodium, the apicomplexan parasite that causes malaria.

The lecturer was a scientist from the Sanger Institute at Cambridge, and he talked mostly about Plasmodium life cycle strategies. I think he made me remember the reason why I want to do research. There are so many unknowns, even for a parasite that we've known and studied for so damn long. There are "?"s written on half the sentences I scribbled down-- not because I didn't understand, but because nobody understands. Yet.

After the lecture, I chatted with the lecturer a little bit about why male gametocytes are in such a hurry to produce gametes. Ten minutes inside the mosquito gut, and the thing has already multiplied its genome thrice and squeezed out 8 flagellated gametes. It's in such a hurry that it uses physical force to pull the chromosomes and bits of nuclear envelope apart, which leads to the production of many gametes with the wrong number of chromosomes. He showed the class a video of the process-- in his own words, it's like "a cat and a dog in a sack"-- the thing whirls and jiggles and bulges and generally looks like it's going to explode. He said he thinks it's sperm competition, rather than any factors in the mosquito gut or the blood meal. Fascinating.


Have some Nat Geo.