Biography
Marcus Lee received his PhD from the University of Melbourne, Australia, where he studied plant defense proteins. He subsequently undertook his postdoctoral training, first in yeast cell biology with Dr. Randy Schekman at the University of California Berkeley, and subsequently with Dr. David Fidock at Columbia University Medical Center, where he worked on mechanisms of resistance to novel antimalarial compounds. Marcus joined the Malaria Programme at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in 2015. His current work continues to focus on drug resistance, and to complement these investigations, he has been developing novel methods to manipulate the parasite genome.
Research
Interests:
Molecular approaches to interrogate malaria parasite genomes
1) CRISPR-Cas genome editing of P. falciparum to
a) validate drug resistance loci
b) regulate gene expression
2) Using CRISPR-Cas to generate a comprehensive library of drug resistant P. falciparum parasites, each individually barcoded
3) A large-scale vector resource for genetic manipulation of P. berghei (with Oliver Billker and Julian Rayner
Collaborations:
Lyn-Marie Birkholtz, University of Pretoria, South Africa
