Skip Navigation



PEDS Advance Access published online on July 3, 2009
Protein Engineering Design and Selection, doi:10.1093/protein/gzp027
This Article
Right arrow Full Text Freely available
Right arrow FREE Full Text (PDF) Freely available
Right arrowOA All Versions of this Article:
22/9/543    most recent
gzp027v1
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Similar articles in PubMed
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to My Personal Archive
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Deem, M. W.
Right arrow Articles by Pan, K.
PubMed
Right arrow PubMed Citation
Right arrow Articles by Deem, M. W.
Right arrow Articles by Pan, K.
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us  
What's this?

© 2009 The Author(s)
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

The epitope regions of H1-subtype influenza A, with application to vaccine efficacy

Michael W. Deem1,2,3 and Keyao Pan1

1Department of Bioengineering and 2Department of Physics and Astronomy, Rice University, 6100 Main Street, MS 142, Houston, TX 77005-1892, USA

3 To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: mwdeem{at}rice.edu

The recent emergence of H1N1 (swine flu) illustrates the ability of the influenza virus to create antigens new to the human immune system, even within a given hemagglutinin and neuraminidase subtype. This new H1N1 strain is sufficiently distinct, for example, from the A/Brisbane/59/2007 (H1N1)-like virus strain of influenza in the 2008/09 Northern hemisphere vaccine that protection is not expected to be substantial. The human immune system responds primarily to the five epitope regions of the hemagglutinin protein. By determining the fraction of amino acids that differ between a vaccine strain and a viral challenge strain in the dominant epitope regions, a measure of antigenic distance that correlates with epidemiological studies of H3 influenza A vaccine efficacy in humans with R2 = 0.81 is derived. This measure of antigenic distance is called pepitope. The relation between vaccine efficacy and pepitope is given by E = 0.47 – 2.47 x pepitope. We here identify the epitope regions of H1 hemagglutinin, so that vaccine efficacy may be reliably estimated for H1N1 influenza A.

Keywords: antibody/epitopes/influenza A/swine flu

Received May 28, 2009; revised May 28, 2009; accepted June 3, 2009.


Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us    What's this?




Disclaimer: Please note that abstracts for content published before 1996 were created through digital scanning and may therefore not exactly replicate the text of the original print issues. All efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, but the Publisher will not be held responsible for any remaining inaccuracies. If you require any further clarification, please contact our Customer Services Department.