Abstract:
The Acquired Immunode ciency Syndrome pandemic continues to have a large social
impact. Many advances in the treatment of infection by the causative agent, Human
Immunode ciency Virus, have been made in the last three decades. However, this treatment
often means a life-long rigorous adherence to treatment and acquisition of resistance
mutations to antiretrovirals. Thus far, the e cacy of promising vaccines has been disappointing.
In the last decade, interest has grown concerning the interaction between
mutations conferring resistance to antiretrovirals and the e ect this has on epitopes recognized
by cytotoxic-T-lymphocytes (CTL). Investigating this is a di cult task, owing
to both the extreme polymorphism of HIV and the polymorphism of the Human Leukocyte
Antigen (HLA) molecules that present peptides to the CTLs. A large amount of
HLA-associated CTL escape mutations have been discovered. Together with this, computational
approaches in CTL epitope discovery is becoming increasingly accurate. Here,
a method of imputing HLA type from patients together with predicting the in
uence of
anitretroviral mutations was used to discover potential epitopes for the HLA B*15 and
B*48 types in the HIV-1 Subtype B pol region.
