Asynchronous nuclear cycles in multinucleated Plasmodium falciparum facilitate rapid proliferation.

Malaria-causing parasites proliferate within erythrocytes through schizogony, forming multinucleated stages before cellularization. Nuclear multiplication does not follow a strict geometric 2n progression, and each proliferative cycle produces a variable number of progeny. Here, by tracking nuclei and DNA replication, we show that individual nuclei replicate their DNA at different times, despite residing in a shared cytoplasm. Extrapolating from experimental data using mathematical modeling, we provide strong indication that a limiting factor exists, which slows down the nuclear multiplication rate. Consistent with this prediction, our data show that temporally overlapping DNA replication events were significantly slower than partially overlapping or nonoverlapping events. Our findings suggest the existence of evolutionary pressure that selects for asynchronous DNA replication, balancing available resources with rapid pathogen proliferation.

An extended DNA-free intranuclear compartment organizes centrosome microtubules in malaria parasites.

Proliferation of Plasmodium falciparum in red blood cells is the cause of malaria and is underpinned by an unconventional cell division mode, called schizogony. Contrary to model organisms, P. falciparum replicates by multiple rounds of nuclear divisions that are not interrupted by cytokinesis. Organization and dynamics of critical nuclear division factors remain poorly understood. Centriolar plaques, the centrosomes of P. falciparum, serve as microtubule organizing centers and have an acentriolar, amorphous structure. The small size of parasite nuclei has precluded detailed analysis of intranuclear microtubule organization by classical fluorescence microscopy. We apply recently developed super-resolution and time-lapse imaging protocols to describe microtubule reconfiguration during schizogony. Analysis of centrin, nuclear pore, and microtubule positioning reveals two distinct compartments of the centriolar plaque. Whereas centrin is extranuclear, we confirm by correlative light and electron tomography that microtubules are nucleated in a previously unknown and extended intranuclear compartment, which is devoid of chromatin but protein-dense. This study generates a working model for an unconventional centrosome and enables a better understanding about the diversity of eukaryotic cell division.

Revisiting Degrees of Freedom of Full-Duplex Systems with Opportunistic Transmission: An Improved User Scaling Law.

It was recently studied how to achieve the optimal degrees of freedom (DoF) in a multi-antenna full-duplex system with partial channel state information (CSI). In this paper, we revisit the DoF of a multiple-antenna full-duplex system using opportunistic transmission under the partial CSI, in which a full-duplex base station having M transmit antennas and M receive antennas supports a set of half-duplex mobile stations (MSs) having a single antenna each. Assuming no self-interference, we present a new hybrid opportunistic scheduling method that achieves the optimal sum DoF under an improved user scaling law. Unlike the state-of-the-art scheduling method, our method is designed in the sense that the scheduling role between downlink MSs and uplink MSs is well-balanced. It is shown that the optimal sum DoF of 2 M is asymptotically achievable provided that the number of MSs scales faster than SNR M , where SNR denotes the signal-to-noise ratio. This result reveals that, in our full-duplex system, better performance on the user scaling law can be obtained without extra CSI, compared to the prior work that showed the required user scaling condition (i.e., the minimum number of MSs for guaranteeing the optimal DoF) of SNR 2 M - 1 . Moreover, the average interference decaying rate is analyzed. Numerical evaluation is performed to not only validate our analysis but also show superiority of the proposed method over the state-of-the-art method.

Linear Algebraic Beamforming Design for Multiuser MISO Interference Channels: A Reduction in Search Space Dimension.

Near-optimal transmit beamformers are designed for multiuser multiple-input single-output interference channels with slowly time-varying block fading. The main contribution of this article is to provide a method for deriving closed-form solutions to effective beamforming in both low and high signal-to-noise ratio regimes. The proposed method basically leverages side information obtained from the channel correlation between adjacent coding blocks. More specifically, our methodology is based on a linear algebraic approach, which is more efficient than the optimal scheme based on the Gaussian input in the sense of reducing the average number of search space dimensions for designing the near-optimal transmit beamformers. The proposed method is shown to exhibit near-optimal performance via computer simulations in terms of the average sum-rate.