Kristina Persson is the PI for this research group

Both Malaria and Babesia are parasites that live inside red blood cells. Malaria is spread with mosquitoes while Babesia is spread with ticks in Sweden. The parasites can also spread via blood transfusion. We are investigating how efficient certain antibodies are and that can stop invasion of new red blood cells, and for Malaria we have created a new method to measure Plasmodium falciparum-specific atypical memory B-cells and shown that these are common in malaria endemic areas. For Babesia we have shown that almost one fifth of individuals that had Borrelia also had Babesia, indicating that more people have been exposed than has been assumed before. We have created a new ELISA-method to measure antibodies against Babesia divergens. We have also shown that the parasites in cultures easily can invade red blood cells from all the common blood groups, which can explain why they can infect both cattle and humans even if the red blood cells look different.