Antigenic determinant conformational

Synthetic and Conformational Studies Related to the Antigenic Determinant of the Forssman Antigen. R. U. Lemieux and P. Hermentin, Abstr. Xth Int. Symp. on Carbohydr. Chem., Sydney, Australia, July (1980), W.l. 

Because of the predominant contribution of conformation to the tertiary structure of protein antigens and because protein antigens may contain several antigenic determinants, the previously described approaches... 

Olsnes, S. and Saltvedt, E., 1975. Conformation-dependent antigenic determinants in the toxic lectin ricin, J. Immunol., 114, pp. 1743-1748. 

Bacterial cell surface polysaccharides frequently carry pyruvic or lactic acids linked to a sugar residue. They act as antigenic determinants. Their conformation has been characterized by NMR spectroscopy (Severn and Richards, 1993). 

HSEA method has been found to generate conformations that are frequently consistent with the NMR dataA Early HSEA-based predictions of the conformations of the blood group antigenic determinants remain examples of the success of the HSEA method when applied to molecules that appear to exist predominantly in one conformation in solution. In contrast, based on somewhat limited data from nuclear Overhauser effect (NOE) intensities, HSEA calculations predicted that sucrose preferred a single rigid conformation in solution. More recent experimental data demonstrated that sucrose is more flexible than had been believed. This example clearly illustrates the pitfalls associated with fitting structures to insufficient and insensitive experimental data. 

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