Vivax Malaria Geo-Barcode

Our EHI scientist and advisors were co-authors in a paper recently published at a Nature Portfolio journal; Communications Biology, titled “A molecular barcode and web-based data analysis tool to identify imported Plasmodium vivax malaria”. The authors developed a tool that can quickly identify the origin of a P. vivax infection – one of the Plasmodium species causing human malaria– using various machine learning methods. The tool produced SNP barcode assays that can be performed with relative ease using amplicon sequencing, which can then be submitted to http://geo.vivaxgen.org – enabling rapid detection of imported vivax malaria cases by users in various malaria centres without requiring extensive bioinformatics knowledge.