Hypervariable proteins come in thousands of slightly different versions.

细分的话，高变蛋白有好几千种。

This suggested that phages are sticking specifically to mucus, and in an elegant series of experiments they found that this was true and that the thing on a phage which is doing the sticking is a " hypervariable" protein called Hoc.

这暗示噬菌体特定存在于粘液中，在一系列巧妙的实验之后，他们发现确实是这样并且发现噬菌体上存在一种称为Hoc的高变蛋白，正是由于这种蛋白质才会使噬菌体特定存在粘液中。