Fig. 3.

Experimental Validation of HLA-A02:01 predicted epitopes from SARS-CoV-2 in human T cell induction assays. a 23 peptides that were predicted to be high binders to HLA-A02:01 were synthesized and assayed in T cell inductions using PBMCs from three human donors. Three epitopes marked with asterisk were chosen based on ViPR, while the remaining 20 were chosen solely based on the predictor score. For our assay, epitopes were considered to be immunogenic if at least one donor raised a T cell response to the peptide as determined by pMHC multimer technology. ViPR confirmation refers to identical sequences from SARS-CoV confirmed via either MHC binding or T cell assays. b Flow cytometry plots of pMHC multimer staining from representative immunogenic SARS-CoV-2 epitopes. Multimer positive populations are circled in red, with the frequency of multimer positive CD8⁺ T cells shown in the upper right-hand corner of each plot