Figure 5.

Activity of CTLs induced with peptide after preimmunization with CFA in HLA-A2.1/K^b transgenic mice. Complete Freund's adjuvant (CFA, 200 μL) was injected subcutaneously into HLA-A2.1/K^b transgenic mice (n = 5) on day-14. The mice were then subcutaneously immunized at the base of the tail with each peptide (100 μg/mice) and T helper epitope (140 μg/mice) emulsified with incomplete Freund's adjuvant (IFA) at 1 : 1 three times (on days 0, 5, and 10). On day 11, all mice were sacrificed and the serum was collected from each mouse to measure the IFN/-γ concentration (a). The splenic lymphocytes were isolated from each mouse and restimulated once with each peptide (10 μg/mL) and mIL-2 (10 U/mL) in vitro for another 6 days. On day 7, the IFN-γ release in each group was measured with an intracellular cytokine staining (ICS) assay (b) and the lysis activity were measured with an LDH assay (c). Peptide-loaded T2A2 cells were used as the target cells. Normal saline (NS) group and Th epitope only group were the negative controls. Statistical significance was determined with Student's t-test (n = 5). ^∗P < 0.05, ^∗∗P < 0.01, and ^∗∗∗P < 0.001 represent the significance of differences relative to the NS group.