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Stephan Hegge (Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Germany)
My work is focused on dissecting the molecular mechanism involved in the motility of the Malaria parasite. I study a specific stage of the parasite, the sporozoite. These develop in the Anopheles mosquito and are injected into the skin of the host during a blood meal of the mosquito. Sporozoites are highly motile and move in the skin to invade the blood circulation. In vitro the parasite moves in circles, thus never leaves the field of view and can easily be imaged up to hours. To quantitatively analyze movement we developed an in vitro assay using GFP-labelled parasites. We developed and established an automated methodology based on quantitative image analysis to assess sporozoite gliding. This Tool for Automatic Sporozoite Tracking (ToAST) automatically translates and analyzes image-based information to numerical data, thereby allowing reliable classification according to sporozoite motility features as well as quantification of parameters such as parasite size, length, curvature, transition and duration of motility states, shape and speed. Since ToAST calculates the parameters for every single of up to 350 parasites in a field of view we generate plenty of data/condition. Thus,