Figure 1

Prediction of total CD4⁺ epitopes. A prediction of 15-mers CD4 epitopes of the 109 proteins of all variants was carried out using the full set alleles of IEDB MHC Class II (27 alleles) and considering only the epitopes that bind to 10 or more alleles. We excluded from the list: (1) the non promiscuous epitopes that bind to less than 14 alleles, (2) the epitopes that were not conserved with 100% of identity among the 10 virus strains, and (3) the epitopes that were duplicated. These filters retrieved 676 CD4⁺ epitopes (Table S2) represented in this Category-plot which shows in the y axis the percentile rank values of all proteins that hold conserved epitopes and, in the x axis, the level of their promiscuity within a color-scale distribution. For each protein, the level of promiscuity increases from 14 to 26 HLA Class II alleles from left to right, along with the variation of colors from light green to dark violet color.