>TIGR01478 STEVOR variant surface antigen, stevor family; InterPro: IPR006374 Malaria is still a major cause of mortality in many areas of the world. Plasmodium falciparum causes the most severe human form of the disease and is responsible for most fatalities. Severe cases of malaria can occur when the parasite invades and then proliferates within red blood cell erythrocytes. The parasite produces many variant antigenic proteins, encoded by multigene families, which are present on the surface of the infected erythrocyte and play important roles in virulence. A crucial survival mechanism for the malaria parasite is its ability to evade the immune response by switching these variant surface antigens. The high virulence of P. falciparum relative to other malarial parasites is in large part due to the fact that in this organism many of these surface antigens mediate the binding of infected erythrocytes to the vascular endothelium (cytoadherence) and non-infected erythrocytes (rosetting). This can lead to the accumulation of infected cells in the vasculature of a variety of organs, blocking the blood flow and reducing the oxygen supply. Clinical symptoms of severe infection can include fever, progressive anaemia, multi-organ dysfunction and coma. For more information see . This entry represents the stevor (short for "subtelomeric variable open reading frame") family of predicted variant surface antigens. This is the third largest variant surface antigen family in P. falciparum, with 33 genes identified in the genome of this parasite . The function of these proteins is not known, but they are expressed during several stages of the parasite life-cycle and may play a variety of roles in parasite survival and infection ..

Probab=91.23  E-value=0.23  Score=27.49  Aligned_cols=28  Identities=39%  Similarity=0.682  Sum_probs=23.7

Q ss_pred             HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHCCC
Q ss_conf             9999999999999999999999741049
Q gi|254780705|r  398 GAILLLLIFLAVINTAMLWLRNRFKKRW  425 (425)
Q Consensus       398 aa~lvLl~~~~~~n~~a~~lr~r~~~~w  425 (425)
T Consensus       278 IAAlVLi~L~V~LIiLYIWLYrRRK~SW  305 (315)
T TIGR01478       278 IAALVLIILTVVLIILYIWLYRRRKKSW  305 (315)
T ss_pred             HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHCCHHH
T ss_conf             9999999999999999888856403035