Figure 4. Ebola Epigraphs.

(A) PTE Epigraph coverage of Ebola relative to a full proteome alignment, including one representative sequence per human outbreak. All 7 proteins in the Filovirus proteome (excluding soluble GPs) were concatenated, 2 Epigraph sequences were generated spanning the full proteome, and these were used to identify the most conserved regions in the proteome based on PTE coverage, highlighted in red. The black line shows 8/9 coverage, the gray line the 9/9, of the population by the 2 Epigraphs, for each consecutive 9-mer in the alignment. The four highly conserved regions together span 825 amino acids. (B) PTE coverage of Filovirus species by different vaccine options. The natural vaccine candidates used were the reference strains EBOV Yambuku-Mayinga, NC_002549; SUDV Gulu, NC_006432; and MARV Mt. Elgon-Musoke, NC_001608. (The four-letter uppercase species names the use standard nomenclature, described in the text). Columns represent the average PTE coverage for a given species, ordered left-to-right according to the legend, for different vaccine options. Deeper colors show 9/9 PTE matches, lighter colors the added coverage by 8/9 matches. Ebolavirus genus species are red, Marburgvirus blue, and Cuevavirus purple. There is a high level of PTE coverage within-species. Vaccines being evaluated in West Africa use a natural EBOV GP antigen³⁰,⁴⁰, and PTE coverage would be excellent for other EBOV strains, but poor for other species (green box, top left). In contrast, a three-antigen conserved-region Epigraph has excellent coverage across all known sequences sampled from Filoviridae (green box, bottom right).