Figure 3. Peptide 32 is shown in comparison to other synthesized peptides containing sieve mutations at position 181 and other mutations (at positions 183–185) that were observed in the viruses found in vaccinee breakthrough infections.

The heat map on the right represents the IFN-γ fold reduction response of the 4 gp120A244 specific CD4+ T cell lines to the altered peptides relative to the consensus sequence. The aa mutation P183Q, was similarly expressed between the the two arms with breakthrough HIV infections. In particular, in the 44 vaccinees, 16 were P (36%), 22 Q (50%), and 5 other residues (E,K,N,S) were also most common. For the 66 Placebo recipients, 28 were P (42%), 31Q (47%), and 7 were other residues (E,K,R,S).