Hundreds of thousands of people die annually from malaria; a protozoan of the genus Plasmodium is responsible for this mortality. The Plasmodium parasite undergoes several life stages within the mosquito vector, the transition between which require passage across the lumen of the mosquito midgut. It has been observed that in about 15% of parasites that develop ookinetes in the mosquito abdomen, sporozoites never develop in the salivary glands, indicating that passage across the midgut lumen is a significant barrier in parasite development (Gamage-Mendis et al., 1993). We aim to investigate a possible correlation between passage through the midgut lumen and drug-resistance trends in Plasmodium falciparum parasites. This study contains a total of 1024 Anopheles mosquitoes: 187 Anopheles gambiae and 837 Anopheles funestus samples collected in high malaria transmission areas of Mozambique between March and June of 2016. Sanger sequencing will be used to determine the prevalence of known resistance alleles for anti-malarial drugs: chloroquine resistance transporter (pfcrt), multidrug resistance (pfmdr1) gene, dihydropteroate synthase (pfdhps) and dihydrofolate reductase (pfdhfr). We compare prevalence of resistance between abdomen and head/thorax in order to determine whether drug resistant parasites are disproportionately hindered during their passage through the midgut lumen. A statistically significant difference between resistance alleles in the two studied body sections supports the efficacy of new anti-malarial gene surveillance strategies in areas of high malaria transmission.

Nonsense mediated decay is a pathway that selectively degrades mRNAs that contain premature termination codons (PTCs). The purpose of this study is to research the evolution of NMD in Parabasalia and infer whether they have a normal, functioning nonsense-mediated decay pathway. Parabasalia are single-celled, flagellated protists that have undergone evolutionary transitions as they become obligate symbionts of termites. The key proteins involved in nonsense-mediated decay, ATM, ATR, UPF1, SMG1, UPF2, UPF3A, UPF3B, were researched and used in order to build phylogenetic trees to analyze what other species of eukaryotes have these same genes and where they branch relative to the nonsense mediated decay proteins present in Parabasalia. The main question being asked in this research is if Parabasalia have enough of the main nonsense mediated decay proteins to have a functional nonsense-mediated decay process and if not, which proteins have been lost over evolutionary history. To carry out this research, phylogenic trees were built using transcriptomes from many different types of eukaryotes that contained the main proteins involved in the nonsense-mediated decay pathway. These transcriptomes were taken from the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) database using the BLAST algorithm, trimmed using TrimAl, aligned by utilizing AliView which utilizes Muscle. Sequoia was then used to remove redundant species from the trees, and IQ-TREE was used to form the phylogenic trees. This process was repeated four times to create well-rounded trees with various eukaryotic species present. The results of this research found that ATM, ATR, UPF1, SMG1, and UPF2 are present in Parabasalia as well as across many eukaryotic groups, whereas UPF3A and UPF3B were not found in many of the eukaryotes researched. This points to Parabasalia having a normal and functioning nonsense-mediated decay pathway as they have the majority of the essential proteins needed for a functional pathway.