Antigens on the Plasmodium falciparum infected erythrocyte surface are not parasite derived.
After invasion by Plasmodium falciparum a red blood cell undergoes marked alterations to its morphology and physiological properties. There are two schools of thought on the origin of these modifications: in the first of this pair of articles, Irwin Sherman and Enrique Winograd put the case for the changes to the surface proteins of the red cell being parasite-induced modifications to host proteins. They suggest that changes to naturally occurring host red cell proteins, especially band 3, result in subtle changes to the antigenicity, cytoadherence and to some extent to the morphology of infected red cells.
Department of Biology, University of California, Riverside, CA 92521, USA.
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