Surface antigens and potential virulence factors from parasites detected by comparative genomics of perfect amino acid repeats.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Many parasitic organisms, eukaryotes as well as bacteria, possess surface antigens with amino acid repeats. Making up the interface between host and pathogen such repetitive proteins may be virulence factors involved in immune evasion or cytoadherence. They find immunological applications in serodiagnostics and vaccine development. Here we use proteins which contain perfect repeats as a basis for comparative genomics between parasitic and free-living organisms.

Results

We have developed Reptile http://reptile.unibe.ch, a program for proteome-wide probabilistic description of perfect repeats in proteins. Parasite proteomes exhibited a large variance regarding the proportion of repeat-containing proteins. Interestingly, there was a good correlation between the perce

SUBMITTER: Fankhauser N 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2254594 | biostudies-literature | 2007 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature