Development and application of a novel method to characterize methylmercury exposure in newborns using dried blood spots.

Background: Methylmercury (MeHg) is a pollutant of global concern. While there is a need to gauge early-life exposures, there remain outstanding ethical, financial, and practical challenges with using the preferred biomarker, whole blood, notably in pregnant women, infants, toddlers, and children. Dried bloodspots (DBS) may help overcome some of these challenges.

The development of sexual stage malaria gametocytes in a Wave Bioreactor.

Background: Blocking malaria gametocyte development in RBCs or their fertilization in the mosquito gut can prevent infection of the mosquito vector and passage of disease to the human host. A 'transmission blocking' strategy is a component of future malaria control. However, the lack of robust culture systems for producing large amounts of Plasmodium falciparum gametocytes has limited our understanding of sexual-stage malaria biology and made vaccine or chemotherapeutic discoveries more difficult.

Large-scale growth of the Plasmodium falciparum malaria parasite in a wave bioreactor.

We describe methods for the large-scale in vitro culturing of synchronous and asynchronous blood-stage Plasmodium falciparum parasites in sterile disposable plastic bioreactors controlled by wave-induced motion (wave bioreactor). These cultures perform better than static flask cultures in terms of preserving parasite cell cycle synchronicity and reducing the number of multiple-infected erythrocytes. The straight-forward methods described here will facilitate the large scale production of malaria parasites for antigen and organelle isolation and characterisation, for the high throughput screening of compound libraries with whole cells or extracts, and the development of live- or whole-cell malaria vaccines under good manufacturing practice compliant standards.