An intrinsic oscillator drives the blood stage cycle of the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum.

The blood stage of the infection of the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum exhibits a 48-hour developmental cycle that culminates in the synchronous release of parasites from red blood cells, which triggers 48-hour fever cycles in the host. This cycle could be driven extrinsically by host circadian processes or by a parasite-intrinsic oscillator. To distinguish between these hypotheses, we examine the P. falciparum cycle in an in vitro culture system and show that the parasite has molecular signatures associated with circadian and cell cycle oscillators. Each of the four strains examined has a different period, which indicates strain-intrinsic period control. Finally, we demonstrate that parasites have low cell-to-cell variance in cycle period, on par with a circadian oscillator. We conclude that an intrinsic oscillator maintains Plasmodium's rhythmic life cycle.

An improved image compression algorithm using binary space partition scheme and geometric wavelets.

Geometric wavelet is a recent development in the field of multivariate nonlinear piecewise polynomials approximation. The present study improves the geometric wavelet (GW) image coding method by using the slope intercept representation of the straight line in the binary space partition scheme. The performance of the proposed algorithm is compared with the wavelet transform-based compression methods such as the embedded zerotree wavelet (EZW), the set partitioning in hierarchical trees (SPIHT) and the embedded block coding with optimized truncation (EBCOT), and other recently developed "sparse geometric representation" based compression algorithms. The proposed image compression algorithm outperforms the EZW, the Bandelets and the GW algorithm. The presented algorithm reports a gain of 0.22 dB over the GW method at the compression ratio of 64 for the Cameraman test image.