Malaria, a relentless global health threat claiming over 600,000 lives annually, primarily targets young children in tropical low- and middle-income nations. Plasmodium falciparum, the main culprit behind most malaria-related deaths, continuously evolves resistance to crucial antimalarial drugs, impeding efforts to eradicate the disease.

Malaria still remains a major public health burden in Africa and is responsible for millions of cases and hundreds of thousands of deaths every year. 

The London Calling 2023 event featured three great talks about the use of nanopore sequencing to characterise a variety of infectious diseases in low-resource settings. Each of these presentations demonstrated how the portable MinION was being utilised to provide rapid sequencing capability to locations where, previously, samples may have had to be sent away for sequencing resulting in turnaround times of weeks.