Ben Liffner

Come and join our team!

We currently have two PhD scholarships between Danny Wilson and myself

We are a supportive, productive, and inclusive research group studying parasite cell biology @ The University of Adelaide in beautiful South Australia

scholarships.adelaide.edu.au/Scholarships...

A dynamic barrier: remodeling of the nuclear envelope during closed mitosis in malaria parasites | mSphere When I first encountered the paper by Weiner et al. in 2011 (1), I was struck not just by the data, but by the questions it raised. Their use of focused ion beam scanning electron microscopy (FIB-SEM) to generate high-resolution 3D reconstructions of nuclear pore organization across the intraerythrocytic cycle of Plasmodium falciparum offered a tantalizing glimpse into the nuclear envelope (NE) of a parasite that replicates unlike any model eukaryote (2). The idea that this structure—a defining feature of eukaryotic cells—could remain intact throughout mitosis, while still accommodating spindle formation, organelle inheritance, and gene regulation, challenged my assumptions about cell division.

A dynamic barrier: remodeling of the nuclear envelope during closed mitosis in malaria parasites | mSphere journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

Thanks very much for having me, and coming along!

Thanks very much to the wonderful folks in the new Flinders Health & Medical Research Building for hosting me on Tuesday!
Cheers to Nick Eyre and @evahesping.bsky.social for the invitation to speak and for showing me around the beautiful new facility!

Go Long Huynh! Fancy cell biology and fancy microscopy on artemisinin resistance in Plasmodium parasites at the BioMalPar conference #EMBLMalaria @benliffner.bsky.social @sabsalon.bsky.social @events.embl.org

Researchers uncover how intestinal parasite Cryptosporidium alters host cells Researchers at the Francis Crick Institute have shown that the Cryptosporidium parasite exports a protein into infected intestinal cells, altering the gut environment and enabling the parasite to surv...

Crick researchers have uncovered how the intestinal Cryptosporidium parasite uses a protein to alter its host’s gut environment, enabling the parasite to survive and replicate.

www.crick.ac.uk/news/2025-04...

The new OrthoMCL-7 with OrthoFinder clustering, Similar Groups, and Phylogenetic Trees is 🌟 now live 🌟at orthomcl.org, part of the @veupathdb.bsky.social
family of resources. The previous version of OrthoMCL-6.21 is still available as a Legacy site.

Cell biology is producing mountains of microscopy data, usually a given paper got that data for some purpose, but what if you could find relevant data that you could use to answer your own questions? in her new preprint, @marymirvis.bsky.social develops Systematic Review methods to do just that

An Essential Adaptor for Apicoplast Fission and Inheritance in Malaria Parasites Blood-stage Plasmodium falciparum parasites rely on a non-photosynthetic plastid, the apicoplast, for survival, making it an attractive target for antimalarial intervention. Like the mitochondrion, th...

🚨 New preprint alert! 🚨
We’ve uncovered a key player in malaria parasite cell division—meet PfAnchor, the first apicoplast-specific dynamin adaptor protein! Check the thread below 🧵for more details. #U_ExM #Malaria #Apicoplast
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Unlocking new understanding of Plasmodium sporozoite biology with expansion microscopy https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.04.09.648058v1

How i feel when I get to look at expanded midguts or salivary glands

Unlocking new understanding of Plasmodium sporozoite biology with expansion microscopy https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.04.09.648058v1

A shoutout to @freddyfrischknecht.bsky.social who has helped me out with my many sporozoite biology queries over the last few years, and likely unknowingly inspired me to find out how many rhoptries a sporozoite has from an email about 6 years ago

A huge thanks to all my co-authors in this study and a special thanks to @sabsalon.bsky.social for letting me loose on a project that initially had nothing to do with what we were previously working on, but has now greatly shaped our research directions!

There are plenty of other interesting tidbits and findings in this study, and after peer review we will make all the imaging data available on an online database so anybody can look through the images themselves!

For the small number of RON11 knockdown parasites that make it to the salivary gland, we found they accumulate in the space between epithelial cells but almost never actually invade or get into the secretory cavity. This interesting observation explains why these parasites are not transmissible!

More important though, these RON11 knockdown sporozoites only made half the number of rhoptries. And when we looked at the small number of sporozoites that made it to the salivary gland, many of them had no rhoptries at all!

Looking at these RON11 knockdown parasites, we saw that late in their rhoptry biogenesis, most of them had aberrant looking rhoptries.

Rhoptry neck protein 11 has crucial roles during malaria parasite sporozoite invasion of salivary glands and hepatocytes The malaria parasite sporozoite sequentially invades mosquito salivary glands and mammalian hepatocytes; and is the Plasmodium lifecycle infective for…

We knew RON11 was also expressed in sporozoites and that its knockdown inhibited salivary gland invasion from a previous study, and we were lucky enough to get access to this parasite line produced by Tomoko Ishino's group
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

We wanted to put this new knowledge of rhoptry biology to the test by looking at what happens when we knockdown a rhoptry protein, but which to choose? Recently, a study of the protein RON11 showed that knockdown of this protein led to merozoites with 1 rhoptry
journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

This led us to the hypothesis that sporozoites have two pairs of rhoptries that are specialised for each of their invasion events: the salivary gland and hepatocytes

One unexpected observation was that of the usually 2 pairs of rhoptries in oocyst sporozoites, they were morphologically distinguishable. We called these the dimorphic (different size) and congruent (same size) rhoptry pairs, with the congruent rhoptries specifically used up during SG invasion.

Wanting to follow the fate of rhoptries through the invasion of sporozoites into the mosquito salivary gland, we could differentiate sporozoites at different stages of this process. Excitingly, we could see that sporozoites use up two rhoptries during salivary gland epithelial cell invasion!

We then put the segmentation score to the test, using it to develop a timeline for the biogenesis of rhoptries in forming sporozoites!

In the past, oocyst size was used a proxy for development, but one sporozoite formation started, we saw no real correlation with developmental stage and oocyst size. Instead we developed what we call the segmentation score, using progress through cytokinesis as a way to assess sporozoite development

Next, we wanted to look at how sporozoites form within the oocyst. But we ran into a problem, oocysts from the same midgut varied massively in their progress through sporozoite development. So how can we compare different oocysts with each other?

We could see plenty of other organelles/structures in oocysts too, like the basal complex, apicoplast, apical polar rings, rhoptries, centriolar plaque and more!

Having seen how powerful expansion microscopy was for studying other aspects of parasite biology, we were really keen to see what this technique could allow us to see in mosquito-stage parasites. Being good cell biologists, we first looked at the cool microtubule spindle structures of oocysts!

Through this, mosquito tissue ultrastructure expansion microscopy (MoTissU-ExM) came to life! A special shoutout to the IUSM PharmTox postdoc professional development grant for funding this travel
bmcmethods.biomedcentral.com/articles/10....

In 2022, the idea to have a look at sporozoites using expansion microscopy came up after Alexis gave a seminar at IUSM! Early attempts were hit and miss for different reasons, but we really got the technique running smoothly after a month working it up with Thiago @jvr-lab.bsky.social