Abstract
THE protozoan parasites Trypanosoma congolense, T. brucei and T. vivax cause extensive disease problems to livestock in Africa1. In many cases trypanosomiasis results from mixed infections due to all three species2. Immunisation has not been successful because of the ability of the parasites to evade the host immune response by changing the antigenic structure of the surface coat3. Chemical and immuno-chemical characterisation of the surface coat of all three species should give insight into the mechanism of antigenic variation. Recent work on the surface coat of T. brucei demonstrates that antigenic variation is the result of a change in structure of a single, variant-specific, surface glycoprotein4,5. No comparable information is available on the structure of the surface coat of T. congolense and T. vivax. We report here some properties of the surface coat of T. congolense.
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Rovis, L., BARBET, A. & WILLIAMS, R. Characterisation of the surface coat of Trypanosoma congolense. Nature 271, 654–656 (1978). https://doi.org/10.1038/271654a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/271654a0
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