Scientists are working hard to make pet-related sneezes and sniffles a distant memory, and there's promising news from researchers analyzing the potential for a vaccine against dog allergies.
In what's being described as a first step in developing such a vaccine, a team in Japan has identified certain parts of molecules that may be responsible for causing an allergic reaction in people whenever a dog is around.
Once these molecular sections have been spotted and isolated, they can potentially be targeted by a vaccine that lessens the immune response they trigger. These sections are technically known as– strings of amino acids that compose part of the protein that our bodies perceive as a threat. "We want to be able to present small doses of these epitopes to the immune system to train it to deal with them, similar to the principle behind any vaccine,"Here the researchers focussed on a particular dog allergen called Can f 1, one of seven such allergens that have previously been identified, andUsing a technique called X-ray crystallography , the team was able to determine the structure of the Can f 1 protein in its entirety, something that hasn't been done before.
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