Shehre-Banoo Malik

Shehre-Banoo Malik began her CIFAR Junior Fellowship in June 2010 under the supervision of Integrated Microbial Biodiversity Scholar Claudio Slamovits in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Dalhousie University in Halifax, and IMB Fellow Brian Leander at the University of British Columbia.  Banoo completed her PhD in Biology in 2007, with supervision by Dr. John M. Logsdon Jr. at the University of Iowa’s Roy J. Carver Center for Comparative Genomics.  She graduated with an honors B.Sc. in Biology from Cape Breton University that included undergraduate research in Dr. W. Ford Doolittle’s laboratory (Dalhousie University), and earned her M.Sc. in Biology from the University of Ottawa with Dr. Guy Drouin.  In 2010, Banoo completed a postdoctoral research position in Dr. Jane M. Carlton’s laboratory at the Department of Medical Parasitology, New York University Langone Medical Center.

Banoo investigates the evolution of fundamental cellular processes in a comparative approach by tracing the evolutionary history of the component proteins that function in those processes.  Her research focuses especially on eukaryotic microorganisms (protists) – organisms that have a nucleus and often other membrane-bound cell structures.  Banoo’s prior work focused on the origin and early evolution of meiosis in diverse organisms, and included studies on the evolutionary relationships among diverse plants and protists.  Her work with Drs. Slamovits and Leander will aim to better understand how genome reduction and plasticity shaped the biology of an entirely parasitic phylum, the Apicomplexa.  This involves comparing the genomes and transcriptomes of often-forgotten highly diverged apicomplexa found in marine invertebrates to better-known parasites of vertebrates, such as the causative agents of malaria, toxoplasmosis and cryptosporidiosis in humans.