Selection of Conserved Epitopes from Hepatitis C Virus for Pan-Populational Stimulation of T-Cell Responses
Figure 1
HCV epitope selection approach. Overview of the approach devised to select invariant HCV-specific CTL epitopes that could be the basis for a broadly protective epitope-based vaccine against HCV. The approach consists of 4 basic steps: selection of epitopes from databases according to the indicated criteria. Immunogen HCV infection means that all selected HCV epitopes were reported to be targeted in the course of a natural infection in humans. They are immunogenic. (2) Sequence variability filtering. We only considered epitopes that do not contain any residue with a variability given by Shannon entropy, , greater than 0.5. (3) Prediction of epitope HLA I binding profiles which enables computation of the percentage of the population that will be able to elicit a T-cell response against a particular epitope (PPC). (4) Selection of subsets of epitopes that with a minimum number of epitopes reach a target PPC.
