In the war against malaria, researchers may have recruited an unlikely ally: a seaweed found in Fiji. In 2005, Julia Kubanek, a chemical ecologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, and her colleagues discovered that the seaweed, a red alga called Callophycus serratus, contains unusual ring-shaped compounds called bromophycolides that are particularly effective at killing cer- tain fungi. In 2009, they found one that also kills the malarial parasite in red blood cells.
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