Cracking the genetic code of the malaria parasite will speed the hunt for new drugs to tackle the killer disease, which is growing resistant to conventional medicines.
Professor Brian Greenwood, head of the 80-strong malaria centre at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, sees the breakthrough announced this evening as a major advance.
"It will accelerate the rate at which we get new tools for malaria control," he said.
In addition to new drugs, understanding the genetic make-up of both the mosquito and its Plasmodium falciparum parasite could help in the development of new insect repellents and traps to prevent mosquito bites.
The need for new medicines has never been more urgent. Malaria kills more than one million people each year - 90 per cent of them in sub-Saharan Africa, where infections are running at record levels.
And traditional tablets are losing their potency.
"It's very important to find new drug targets. The present cheap drugs that we've got are useless in South-East Asia and the parasite is becoming increasingly resistant in Africa," Professor Greenwood said.
For decades, the mainstay treatment for malaria has been chloroquine, a medicine costing about six US cents for a course, which has saved millions of lives.
But now parasites are becoming resistant to chloroquine and, more recently, to sulphadoxine-pyrimethamine, or Fansidar, another cheap drug chosen when chloroquine doesn't work.