Anaplasma marginale is a tick-borne pathogen, one of several closely related ehrlichial organisms that cause disease in animals and humans. These Ehrlichia species have complex life cycles that require, in addition to replication and development within the tick vector, evasion of the immune system in order to persist in the mammalian reservoir host. This complexity requires efficient use of the small ehrlichial genome. A. marginale and related ehrlichiae express immunoprotective, variable outer membrane proteins that have similar structures and are encoded by polymorphic multigene families. We show here that the major outer membrane protein of A. marginale, MSP2, is encoded on a polycistronic mRNA. The genomic expression site for this mRNA is polymorphic and encodes numerous amino acid sequence variants in bloodstream populations of A. marginale. A potential mechanism for persistence is segmental gene conversion of the expression site to link hypervariable msp2 sequences to the promoter and polycistron.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 6. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 27 August 2019.
All research outputs
#6,780,480
of 31,542,270 outputs
Outputs from Infection and Immunity
#2,820
of 15,301 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#10,459
of 54,857 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Infection and Immunity
#25
of 129 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 31,542,270 research outputs across all sources so far. This one has received more attention than most of these and is in the 74th percentile.
So far Altmetric has tracked 15,301 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a little more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 5.4. This one has gotten more attention than average, scoring higher than 64% of its peers.
Older research outputs will score higher simply because they've had more time to accumulate mentions. To account for age we can compare this Altmetric Attention Score to the 54,857 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one has gotten more attention than average, scoring higher than 66% of its contemporaries.
We're also able to compare this research output to 129 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has gotten more attention than average, scoring higher than 63% of its contemporaries.
