Fig. 4.

Predicting the impact of emerging SARS-CoV-2 variants on T cell responses. List of known epitopes recognized by CD4⁺ and CD8⁺ T cells available in IEDB (www.IEDB.org) in combination with amino acid mutations related to a broad list of SARS-CoV-2 variants including variants of concern and interest. Analysis of the database revealed similarly high numbers of conserved epitopes and, conversely, low numbers of epitopes with variant-specific mutations, disregarding the variant mutations analyzed. Further, the majority of mutations in epitopes do not impact the ability of HLA molecules to present the epitope to T cells. Thus, the number of epitopes impacted by variants and the number of epitopes still recognized by the T cell response are likely to be higher than estimated.