Fig. 1.

In silico evidence for divergent allele advantage across five classical human MHC genes. Correlation between pairwise genetic distances reported as Grantham distance (x axes) and number of bound peptides (y axes) counted for all possible pairs of common HLA alleles. Each dot represents an allele pair. Binding prediction analyses performed on the complete data set of pathogen proteins (n = 232). Linear model (red line) and smoothed lowess curve (dashed blue line), describing the association between the combined number of bound peptides and pairwise Grantham sequence divergence. Note the different axis scales.