Conducts basic and applied research on host-parasite relationships to ascertain fundamental information on the molecular biology, epidemiology and genetics of parasites, and uses functional genomics approaches to investigate host resistance to parasites and parasite drug resistance. This work is performed in order to reduce the impact of economically-important parasitic diseases on food safety and animal health. Major research objectives are divided among three research programs involving: (1) identification of genes and/or gene products for distinguishing and characterizing difficult to diagnose parasites and parasitic diseases; (2) molecular methods to characterize, produce and test parasite proteins, cloned parasite genes and cloned cytokines for modulating host susceptibility to infection; and (3) high throughput DNA sequencing and functional genomics approaches to identify disease agents and characterize mechanisms associated with parasite drug resistance.