[Communiqué]

Congratulations to Arthur Talman, IRD Research Leader in the MIVEGEC laboratory (Montpellier), who has been awarded an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council (ERC) for the project "TROJAN - Molecular mimicry and immune evasion in malaria parasites ".

For this project, the team will be looking for a parasitologist, an immunologist and a computational biologist.

Ana Rita Gomes, a CNRS Research Associate at the Laboratory of Pathogens and Host Immunity in Montpellier, and former Postdoctoral fellow of the LabEx ParaFrap, has been awarded the prestigious CNRS Bronze Medal in 2023.

This esteemed recognition highlights her exceptional contributions to the field of Parasitology and her dedication to advancing our understanding of pathogens. This Bronze Medal, awarded by the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), is highly esteemed within the scientific community. It aims to honor early-career researchers and serves as an encouragement from CNRS to continue well-established and fruitful research in their respective fields. Ana Rita's receipt of this medal highlights her significant impact and potential as a scientist.

Ana Rita Gomes' research utilizes omics approaches to explore DNA replication and cell cycle regulation in malaria-causing parasites. With a background in microbiology, she pursued her doctoral program at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Cambridge (United Kingdom) under the supervision of Oliver Billker, where she studied the functional genetics of the malaria parasite (2010-2015). During this time, she developed large-scale reverse genetic screening technologies, paving the way for high-throughput malaria research. As a postdoc, she continued to develop this technology at the Wellcome Sanger Institute and Imperial College London. In 2015, she relocated to Montpellier and initiated a new research line focusing on DNA biology in Plasmodium in Dr. Jose-Juan LOPEZ-RUBIO's team (ParaFrap fellowship). She was subsequently recruited by CNRS as a CRCN (Chargée de recherche de classe normale) at the end of December 2018, joining the LPHI unit in Montpellier. Her group was initially funded by a starting grant ANR JCJC (2020-2024) and i-SITE MUSE (2021-2023). Ana Rita is also the recipient of an ERC Starting Grant 2023.

By honoring Ana Rita Batista Gomes with the CNRS Bronze Medal, the scientific community not only recognizes her past achievements but also eagerly anticipates the discoveries to come in her promising career.

```

Happy New Year 2024! To kick off this new scientific year, here is the ParaFrap webinar schedule.

Since January 2021, ParaFrap has been organizing a series of webinars. This monthly event, held every 2nd Thursday of the month, aims to strengthen cohesion within the consortium and share the latest advances in the Parasitology community.

Open to all, these webinars allow ParaFrap members to present their research activities, and participants to ask questions.

To subscribe to the mailing list and receive invitations for each webinar and news from ParaFrap, register via this form. We look forward to your participation.

Sign up for monthly webinars

The team of Dr. Mohamed-Ali Hakimi, in collaboration with Isabelle Coppens (Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health and Malaria Research Institute, Baltimore, MD, USA), has developed a new (epi)genetic method to produce in vitro Toxoplasma pre-gametes.

Published in Nature : Ana Vera Antunes, Martina Shahinas, Christopher Swale, Dayana C. Farhat, Chandra Ramakrishnan, Christophe Bruley, Dominique Cannella, Marie G. Robert, Charlotte Corrao, Yohann Couté, Adrian B. Hehl, Alexandre Bougdour, Isabelle Coppens & Mohamed-Ali Hakimi (2023) In vitro production of cat-restricted Toxoplasma pre-sexual stages. Nature. doi: 10.1038/s41586-023-06821-y.