BACKGROUND The reservoir of Plasmodium infection in humans has traditionally been defined by blood slide positivity. This study was designed to characterize the local reservoir of infection in relation to the diverse var genes that encode the major surface antigen of Plasmodium falciparum blood stages and underlie the parasite's ability to establish chronic infection and transmit from human to ...

A four-dimensional ensemble variational (4D-EnVar) data assimilation has been developed for a limited area model. The integration of tangent linear and adjoint models, as applied in standard 4D-Var, is replaced with the use of an ensemble of non-linear model states to estimate fourdimensional background error covariances over the assimilation time window. The computational costs for 4D-En-Var a...

The Su(var)3-7 protein is essential for fly viability, and several lines of evidence support its key importance in heterochromatin formation: it binds to pericentric heterochromatin, it potently suppresses variegation and it interacts with HP1. However, the mode of action of Su(var)3-7 is poorly understood. Here we investigate in vivo the consequences of increased Su(var)3-7 expression on fly v...

Vector autoregressions (VAR) are extensively used to model economic time series. The large number of parameters is the main diicult with VAR models, however. To overcome this, Litterman (1986) suggests to use a Bayesian strategy to estimate the VAR, equation by equation, where, a priori, the lags have decreasing importance (known as Litterman Prior). In this paper, a VAR model is analyzed throu...

This paper will try to look into the two important methods for the calculation of Value at Risk (VaR) for non linear portfolio using Monte Carlo Simulation method. The two techniques Closed form VaR and Multilevel Monte Carlo VaR for valuing the derivative portfolio are explained in details. In case of multilevel Monte Carlo simulation, it has been found that with decrease in the number of inne...

Antigenic variation of Plasmodium falciparum is mediated by a mutually exclusive expression mechanism that limits expression to an individual member of the multicopy var gene family. This process determines the antigenic and adhesive phenotype of the infected red blood cell. Previously, we showed that var gene switching is influenced by chromosomal position. Here, we address whether var gene tr...

Superelastic wires and diamond-shaped stent surrogates were manufactured from Nitinol rods and tubing, respectively, from five different mill product suppliers - Standard VAR, Standard VIM, Standard VIM+VAR, Process-Optimized VIM+VAR, and High-Purity VAR. High-cycle fatigue tests up to 10(7) cycles were conducted under tension-tension conditions for wires and bending conditions for diamonds. Th...

BACKGROUND and Aims The four cultivated Erythroxylum taxa (E. coca var. coca, E. novogranatense var. novogranatense, E. coca var. ipadu and E. novogranatense var. truxillense) are indigenous to the Andean region of South America and have been cultivated for folk-medicine and, within the last century, for illicit cocaine production. The objective of this research was to assess the structure of g...

Members of the Plasmodium falciparum var gene family encode clonally variant adhesins, which play an important role in the pathogenicity of tropical malaria. Here we employ a selective panning protocol to generate isogenic P.falciparum populations with defined adhesive phenotypes for CD36, ICAM-1 and CSA, expressing single and distinct var gene variants. This technique has established the frame...