Comprehensive Screening of Mouse T-Cell Epitopes in Human Herpesvirus 6B Glycoprotein H/L/Q1/Q2 Tetramer Complex

Figure 2

T-cell responses of immunised BALB/c mice upon vaccination with expression plasmid DNA. Undepleted whole splenocytes immunised with each expression plasmid for gH, gL, gQ1, and gQ2 (a), or a mixture of them (b) were tested for the corresponding library peptides (gH: No. 1–69, gL: No. 70–93, gQ1: No. 94–144, and gQ2: No. 145–162). After 20 h of stimulation, the quantity of IFN-γ (pg/mL) for each peptide was measured by ELISA and transformed to a score (, where is the quantity of IFN-γ for each peptide). Individual peptide samples with a score exceeding 0.01 were considered as positive. Black bar indicates three detections, and gray bar indicates two detections out of three independent experiments. Data are shown as the mean of three independent experiments. Consistently detected peptides shown by black bars in (a) and (b) were chosen and another independent experiment was performed. Undepleted whole splenocytes (c), CD8⁺ T-cell-depleted splenocytes (d), and CD4⁺ T-cell-depleted splenocytes (e) were tested for reactivity to the chosen peptides. After 20 h of stimulation, the production of IFN-γ was measured by ELISA. Data are presented in pg/mL and shown as . The gray dot lines indicate the boundaries of gH, gL, gQ1, and gQ2.