Variability and Exclusion in Host and Parasite: Epigenetic Regulation of Ig and var Expression

The immune system generates highly diverse AgRs of different specificities from a pool of designated genomic loci, each containing large arrays of genes. Ultimately, each B or T cell expresses a receptor of a single type on its surface. Immune evasion by the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum is mediated by the mutually exclusive expression of a single member of the var family of genes, which encodes variant surface Ags. In this review, we...