Fig 1. In vivo cellular immunogenicity of MVA deletion mutants, lacking clusters of genes, with TIP antigen.

Five groups of female BALB/c mice (n = 4) were immunized (i.d.) with MVAwt with TIP model antigen (MVA-TIP), or MVA deletion mutant (lacking different clusters of genes, described in Table 1) at the dose of 1x10⁶ pfu/ml. Seven days post immunization, mice were sacrificed and spleens collected for intracellular cytokine staining and flow cytometry to determine the percentage of IFN-γ-secreting CD8⁺ T splenocytes in response to in vitro re-stimulation with pb9 peptide (A), or with MVA vector-specific peptides (B and C). These values are presented after subtracting the values of unstimulated cells for every mouse (sample). The mean of each group is shown. Data is representative of two independent experiments. There was no statistical significant increase in any of the tested groups as compared to the control (MVA-TIP) using Kruskal-Wallis test with Dunn's multiple comparisons.