School of Infection & Immunity

Dr Malgorzata Domagalska

Title: Unravelling the role of genomic and functional heterogeneity of Leishmania in adaptation to environmental changes

Synopsis: The aim of my unit’s research is to understand the molecular mechanisms enabling Trypanosomatid parasites, and Leishmania in particular to adapt to environmental changes, with a specific focus on drug exposure. This includes addressing how genetic (drug resistance) and non-genetic (drug tolerance) mechanisms contribute to Leishmania’s survival under drug pressure. In this context, we study how genome instability and aneuploidy, quiescence and persistence, and parasite’s cell-to-cell heterogeneity facilitate this adaptation. In this talk, I will discuss how parasite’s functional (quiescence) and genomic (mosaic aneuploidy) heterogeneity allow survival of Leishmania under drug pressure. I will present our recent results that demonstrate the existence of quiescent persister-like cells in cultured Leishmania populations, induced upon exposure to antimony, a widely used anti-leishmanial.  These persisters are a small fraction of non-proliferative cells that can survive lethal doses of antimonials and exhibit cross-tolerance to other anti-leishmanial drugs. Surprisingly, cells from strains with existing genomic resistance to antimony acquired a level of hyper-resistance after transient passage through the persister state. In the second part of my talk, I will discuss how a high throughput single-cell genome sequencing approach can be applied to study genome instability and mosaic aneuploidy and their role in adaptation. 

Bio: Malgorzata Anna Domagalska is a molecular biologist and geneticist who started her scientific career in the field of plant developmental biology. She carried her PhD research at the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Cologne. In 2015, she made a successful switch from plant molecular genetics into the field of molecular parasitology by joining the group of Prof. Jean-Claude Dujardin at the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp (ITM) as a research fellow. Since then, she has been working at ITM and in January 2025 she was appointed as an Associate Professor and the head of the newly created Unit of Experimental Parasitology (EPU). Throughout her employment at ITM, Dr. Domagalska has been instrumental in the development of protocols for direct sequencing of Leishmania genomes and transcriptomes in host samples, as well as in establishing a single-cell genomics and transcriptomics platform to study Leishmania cell-to-cell heterogeneity. In her research, she combines cell and molecular parasitology with (single) cell transcriptomics, genomics to characterise molecular mechanisms of parasite adaptation to environmental changes, particularly in the context of drug exposure. 

First published: 8 September 2026

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