Fig. 1: Immunogenicity of MPER/liposome vaccine.
a Schematics of the N-terminally palmitoylated MPER preceding the transmembrane domain of the HIV-1 HxB2 gp41 (pMPERTM) immunogen arrayed on the membrane surface and a standard liposome vaccine formulation including MPLA adjuvant, LACK CD4 T cell helper epitope, PEG-2000 and MPER peptide. The MPER is shown as 2 helices separated by a hinge as was defined by NMR studies73. b Serum IgG responses of four representative BALB/c mice administered intradermally with 50 μl of pMPERTM/liposome vaccine three times at 3-week interval as described in Methods. The immune sera were collected 30 days after the final injection and MPER-specific IgG responses were determined against Npalm-MPER/liposome by ELISA. c gp160 binding of purified polyclonal antibody from combined immune sera of the 4 mice shown in (b). 293T cells expressing ADA gp145 were stained with the purified polyclonal antibody at 50 μg/ml (blue line). Histogram shown as filled gray area indicates untransfected negative control cells stained with the same polyclonal antibody. d A heatmap comparing epitope specificities of 6 vaccine-elicited rmAbs by Biacore 3000 using liposome-bound single alanine MPER mutants. The horizontal color bar indicates the percent rmAb-binding activity against each single-residue mutant compared to that of wild-type MPER (WT) (100%). Ab name and affinity as determined by Biacore are given in top and bottom lines, respectively. Source data for (b) and (d) are provided as a Source Data file.
