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  • Title: Switching trypanosome coats: what's in the wardrobe?
    Author: Taylor JE, Rudenko G.
    Journal: Trends Genet; 2006 Nov; 22(11):614-20. PubMed ID: 16908087.
    Abstract:
    The African trypanosome Trypanosoma brucei is best known for its extraordinarily sophisticated antigenic variation of a protective variant surface glycoprotein (VSG) coat. T. brucei has >1000 VSG genes and pseudogenes, of which one is transcribed at a time from one of multiple telomeric VSG expression sites. Switching the active VSG gene can involve DNA rearrangements replacing the old VSG with a new one, or alternatively transcriptional control. The astonishing revelation from the T. brucei genome sequence is that <7% of the sequenced VSGs seem to have fully functional coding regions. This preponderance of pseudogenes in the VSG gene repertoire will necessitate a rethink of how antigenic variation in African trypanosomes operates.
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