Although the malaria parasite, which attacks red blood cells, is
one of the deadliest killers on the planet, there is a great
deal scientists don’t know about how it works. Scientists do
know that malaria makes red blood cells stiffer, which impedes
their ability to move through the bloodstream, and it makes them
stickier, which causes them to clump together and stick to blood
vessel walls. But Suresh’s work has yielded far more precise
knowledge of just how stiff red blood cells get. Researchers had
believed infected cells to be about three times as stiff as
healthy cells, but Suresh showed that they are in fact up to 10
times as stiff. Malaria parasites grow to maturity within 48
hours. Suresh wants to know how the stiffness of affected red
blood cells changes as the parasite matures.Experiments on such
a time scale would have been almost impossible in the past:
Suresh and his colleagues previously used optical tweezers that
might need an hour to catch a single blood cell, and it took
hours more to process