Primary Structural Variation in Anaplasma marginale Msp2 Efficiently Generates Immune Escape Variants.

ABSTRACT: Antigenic variation allows microbial pathogens to evade immune clearance and establish persistent infection. Anaplasma marginale utilizes gene conversion of a repertoire of silent msp2 alleles into a single active expression site to encode unique Msp2 variants. As the genomic complement of msp2 alleles alone is insufficient to generate the number of variants required for persistence, A. marginale uses segmental gene conversion, in which oligonucleotide segments from multiple alleles are recombined into the expression site to generate a novel msp2 mosaic not represented elsewhere in the genome. Whether these segmental changes are sufficient to evade a broad antibody response is unknown. We addressed this question by identifying Msp2 variants that differed in primary structure within the imm

SUBMITTER: Graca T 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4598416 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature