Congrats to Noah Brown and colleagues from the Jenny Güler lab for their recent publication
“Replication stress increases de novo CNVs across the malaria parasite genome.”
Brown N, Luniewski A, Yu X, Warthan M, Liu S, Zulawinska J, Ahmad S, Prasad N, Congdon M, Santos W, Xiao F, Guler JL. (2026)
Nucleic Acids Res. 54:gkaf1436
doi: 10.1093/nar/gkaf1436
Copy number variations (CNVs) are gains or losses of large DNA segments that can help organisms adapt, but rare CNVs in just a few cells are easy to miss. This study shows that in the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum, mild stress from an antimalarial drug increases the number of new CNVs across the genome, especially in genes involved in infecting humans, linking DNA replication stress to genome changes.