Immunogenicity and specificity of collagen. IX. Resistance of different antigenic determinants of calf collagen to proteolytic treatment.

Serologically active collagen peptides obtained after trypsin or collagenase treatment were further digested by different proteases. The influence of degradation on the inhibiting activity was studied with collagen antibodies possessing three different restricted specificities. Structures responsible for general collagen specificity proved to be highly resistant to the action of different proteases except for collagenase. This suggests the location of this specificity in the helical apolar sequences of collagen. Quite in contrast species-specific structures appeared very susceptible to the further degradations used.