Article révisé par les pairs
| Résumé : | The replacement of a few uridylic acid residues in the ribonucleic acid of tobacco mosaic virus appears to modify the array of antigenic determinants on many of the protein subunits. The presence of C-terminal threonine in all these modified units shows that they are complete polypeptide chains. It is difficult, on quantitative grounds, to explain the large modifications of the antigenic determinants by the localization in these determinants of the few amino acid replacements which the observed thiouridylic incorporation might cause. It is hypothesized that the tertiary structure of the polypeptide is responsible for antigenic specificity and that amino acid replacement occurring in any of a number of points of the molecule can alter this tertiary structure. © 1965. |
