ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2020
Host circadian clocks do not set the schedule for the within-host replication of malaria parasites.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
17 citing papers in PubMed, 27 citations in OpenAlex.
- Circadian considerations in antimicrobials.European journal of clinical pharmacology · 2026Review
- Time-of-day of infection: impact on liver stage malaria parasites in untreated and drug-treated hosts.Parasites & vectors · 2025Article
- Circadian disruption of feeding-fasting rhythm and its consequences for metabolic, immune, cancer, and cognitive processes.Biomedical journal · 2025Review
- Phenotypic and fitness consequences of plasticity in the rhythmic replication of malaria parasites.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Circadian rhythms: pervasive, and often times evasive.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Immune regulation of host energy metabolism and periodicity of malaria parasites.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Melatonin as a Circadian Marker forInternational journal of molecular sciences · 2024Review
- Testing the evolutionary drivers of malaria parasite rhythms and their consequences for host-parasite interactions.Evolutionary applications · 2024Article
- Virulence is associated with daily rhythms in the within-host replication of the malaria parasiteEvolutionary applications · 2024Article
- The parasite intraerythrocytic cycle and human circadian cycle are coupled during malaria infection.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Mistimed malaria parasites re-synchronize with host feeding-fasting rhythms by shortening the duration of intra-erythrocytic development.Parasite immunology · 2022Review
- Circadian rhythms in immunity and host-parasite interactions.Parasite immunology · 2022Review
- Synchronization between peripheral circadian clock and feeding-fasting cycles in microfluidic device sustains oscillatory pattern of transcriptome.Nature communications · 2021Article
- Ecology of asynchronous asexual replication: the intraerythrocytic development cycle of Plasmodium berghei is resistant to host rhythms.Malaria journal · 2021Article
- Daily rhythms of both host and parasite affect antimalarial drug efficacy.Evolution, medicine, and public health · 2021Article
- Do malignant cells sleep at night?Genome biology · 2020Review
- Testing possible causes of gametocyte reduction in temporally out-of-synch malaria infections.Malaria journal · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Circadian clocks coordinate organisms' activities with daily cycles in their environment. Parasites are subject to daily rhythms in the within-host environment, resulting from clock-control of host activities, including immune responses. Parasites also exhibit rhythms in their activities: the timing of within-host replication by malaria parasites is coordinated to host feeding rhythms. Precisely which host feeding-related rhythm(s) parasites align with and how this is achieved are unknown. Understanding rhythmic replication in malaria parasites matters because it underpins disease symptoms and fuels transmission investment. We test if rhythmicity in parasite replication is coordinated with the host's feeding-related rhythms and/or rhythms driven by the host's canonical circadian clock. We find that parasite rhythms coordinate with the time of day that hosts feed in both wild-type and clock-mutant hosts, whereas parasite rhythms become dampened in clock-mutant hosts that eat continuously. Our results hold whether infections are initiated with synchronous or with desynchronized parasites. We conclude that malaria parasite replication is coordinated to rhythmic host processes that are independent of the core-clock proteins PERIOD 1 and 2; most likely, a periodic nutrient made available when the host digests food. Thus, novel interventions could disrupt parasite rhythms to reduce their fitness, without interference by host clock-controlled homeostasis.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.