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Figure 1 | Malaria Journal

Figure 1

From: Identification of minimal human MHC-restricted CD8+ T-cell epitopes within the Plasmodium falciparum circumsporozoite protein (CSP)

Figure 1

Plasmodium falciparum CSP: structure, vaccines and distribution of class I and class II-restricted epitopes. The structure of P. falciparum CSP (3D7) comprises of N- and C-terminal regions flanking a central repeat region (Panel A). The N-terminal region contains a conserved region R1, and the C-terminal region contains variable T epitope regions Th2R and Th3R that are contained within the thrombospondin-like type I repeat (TSR), and ends in a region attached to the GPI anchor. The RTS,S vaccine contains part of the repeats and the C-terminal region; the Ad-C vaccine contains full length CSP, except for a deletion of 16 NANP repeats (64 aa) leaving 26 repeats intact and for an insertion of a 23 aa tail at the C terminus (derived from the 3’-noncoding bovine growth hormone polyadenylation sequence). Published class II (Panel B) and class I (Panel C) epitopes occur in the N- and C-terminals. The sequences for the CSP peptide pools Cp1-Cp9 and the individual 15mers within each of four dominant pools are listed (Panel D). Amino acids 1–39, 29–71, 309–331 and 357–397, corresponding to the four immunodominant pools, were included in the analysis. Amino acids 72–308 and 332–356 were excluded. Panel E shows the new predicted class I-restricted epitopes derived from the Cp1, Cp2, Cp6 and Cp9 15mers. Those that were confirmed in ELISpot depletion or ICS assays are boxed (Panel E).

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