What is it about?
African trypanosomes such as Trypanosoma congolense are parasites transmitted by the tsetse fly that cause devastating diseases in humans and livestock throughout sub-Saharan Africa. To survive in the animal's bloodstream, the parasite periodically replaces the proteins of its surface coat. These proteins are variant antigens (Variant Surface Glycoproteins or VSG). In this study, we have analysed 41 T. congolense genomes, inspected the diversity of these antigens, and designed variant antigen profiling, a method that can accurately and rapidly characterise the variant antigen repertoire of any T. congolense strain from genomic and transcriptomic data.
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Why is it important?
Variant antigens are highly relevant to pathology and disease control, but analysing them from big data is challenging because of their numbers, dynamics and sequence complexity. With variant antigen profiling, we can compare variant antigen repertoires between isolates, replicates, and conditions in a high-throughput manner.
Perspectives
This project has been an exciting journey. I expect variant antigen profiling to make life easier for anyone wanting to characterise or compare VSG diversity and/or expression. We can now ask more questions because we have the means to answer them.
Dr Sara Silva Pereira
University of Liverpool
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Variant antigen repertoires inTrypanosoma congolensepopulations and experimental infections can be profiled from deep sequence data using universal protein motifs, Genome Research, July 2018, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press,
DOI: 10.1101/gr.234146.118.
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