Fig. 2.

Results of lymphocyte proliferation assays in response to pools of peptides corresponding to HEV ORF2 protein among patients with acute hepatitis E (solid bars) and healthy controls (empty bars). The bars indicate stimulation indices in the presence of pools of nine 20-mer peptides (10 μg/mL each). The horizontal line indicates the cut-off of 2.0, above which stimulation indices were considered as significant. For four pools (pools 2, 5, 6 and 8), the proportion of patients with significant stimulation was higher among patients than in controls. The numbers on X-axes represent serial numbers for patient and controls. Hatched lines represent the two patients (19 and 25) who had fulminant hepatic failure.