Although PLC plays an important role in VSG cleavage, a previous study showed that deletions in PLC genes did not lead to a significant loss in virulence (Leal et al., 2001), which implies that antigenic variation is the primary immune escape mechanism adopted by African trypanosomes during infection (Magez et al., 2002; Morrison, 2011; Geiger et al., 2016). Here, HSPG2 is linked to infection.