Community structure has been widely identified as a feature of many real-world networks. It has been shown that the antigenic diversity of a pathogen population can be significantly affected by the contact network of its hosts; however, the effects of community structure have not yet been explored. Here, we examine the congruence between patterns of antigenic diversity in pathogen populations i...

background and objectives : 300 pseudomonas aeruginosa strains were isolated from hospitalized patients in iran. using international antigenic typing system (iats) antibodies, all strains were classified into 16 serotypes while serotype 14 was not identified among the 17 known serotypes. to evaluate the rate of cross-reactivity between o- antigenic determinants, monospecific polyclonal antibodi...

Two experiments were conducted to determine the effect of maternal lipid supplementation on the immune response to antigenic challenge in suckling calves. In Exp. 1, beginning 1 d postpartum, 18 primiparous crossbred beef cows were fed Foxtail millet hay and a low-fat (control) supplement or a supplement containing cracked, high-linoleate safflower seed in individual feeding stanchions until d ...

Pregnant women are infected by specific variants of Plasmodium falciparum that adhere and accumulate in the placenta. Using serological and molecular approaches, we assessed the global antigenic diversity of surface antigens expressed by placenta-binding isolates to better understand immunity to malaria in pregnancy and evolution of polymorphisms and to inform vaccine development. We found that...

Many of the remaining challenges in infectious disease control involve pathogens that fail to elicit long-lasting immunity in their hosts. Antigenic variation is a common reason for this failure and a contributor to the complexity of vaccine design. Diversifying selection by the host immune system is commonly, and often correctly, invoked to explain antigenic variability in pathogens. However, ...

Urease was purified 500-fold to electrophoretic homogeneity from ground, dry soybeans. Sodium dodecyl sulfate-acrylamide gel electrophoresis indicates a subunit size of 93,500 daltons which is identical with that of jack bean urease. In solutions of high ionic strength, there exists a single urease species (species 1) with a size of about 480,000 daltons based on agarose column chromatography a...

We present a novel model that describes the within-host evolutionary dynamics of parasites undergoing antigenic variation. The approach uses a multi-type branching process with two types of entities defined according to their relationship with the immune system: clans of resistant parasitic cells (i.e. groups of cells sharing the same antigen not yet recognized by the immune system) that may be...

Histo-blood group antigens (HBGAs) are a source of antigenic variation between individuals that modulates resistance and susceptibility to pathogens and is a barrier to the spread of enveloped viruses. HBGAs are also produced by a few prokaryotes where they are synthesized by glycosyltransferases (GTs) related to human HBGA synthases. Here we report the first structure of a bacterial GT of this...

Seasonal influenza has considerable impact around the world, both economically and in mortality among risk groups. The long term patterns of disease are hard to capture with simple models, while the interplay of epidemiological processes with antigenic evolution makes detailed modelling difficult and computationally intensive. We identify a number of characteristic features of flu incidence tim...

Earlier models of virus evolution during single infections do not include target cell limitation. Here we extend the basic mathematical framework of these theories and study the effect of target cell limitation on the evolution of antigenic variation, increasing replication rates and increasing virus load. We find that target cell limitation provides a selection pressure against antigenic diver...