Figure 2.

The majority of recombinant proteins are immunoreactive to sera from individuals living in schistosomiasis-endemic areas and contain heat-labile conformational epitopes. Recombinant proteins were probed with pooled sera from individuals living in schistosomiasis-endemic areas (“infected,” red checked bars) or individuals from the United Kingdom who have never been infected (“control,” green dotted bars). To test for the presence of heat-labile epitopes, recombinant proteins were also heat-treated (80°C, 10 minutes) before being exposed to immune sera (“infected heat treated,” orange hatched bars). All except 2 proteins (18 and 57, shown in blue) were seropositive, as determined by A_protein > A_control + 3SD_control ( = 0.201) (red dashed line), where control is the rat Cd4d3 + 4 protein tag. High immunoreactivity was determined as A_protein > 0.3 (green dotted line). Proteins that exhibited little or no loss of reactivity after heat treatment are shown in italics, including 16 highly reactive proteins (6, 7, 14, 16, 19, 30, 32, 34, 36, 42, 49, 54, 56, 89, 101, 105). All measurements were performed in triplicate; error bars = standard deviation.