Figure 4. The effect of MHC specificity and polymorphism on the selection pressure on epitope precursors.

This example shows the first 100 amino acids of the NEF protein of the HIV-1 HXB2 reference sequence (accession: K03455), and the precursors and epitopes for two fictitious hosts. The lines represent the epitope precursors generated by the monomorphic proteasome and TAP. The black lines depict those epitope precursors that are used by the MHC alleles. In this example, 4 out of 5 epitope precursors were released from selection pressure, as were 32 out of 70 amino acids.