Study compared the handling of overlapping 24-mer peptides from HIV Nef either mixed or covalently linked in tandem in one protein. With adjuvant, overlapping peptides were capable of protecting Balb/c mice against lethal viral challenge with 3 × 108 plaque forming units of vv-nef, whereas the intact protein was less protective (Zhang et al., 2009).
Zhang et al., 2009: Zhang H, Hong H, Li D, Ma S, Di Y, Stoten A, Haig N, Di Gleria K, Yu Z, Xu XN, McMichael A, Jiang S. Comparing pooled peptides with intact protein for accessing cross-presentation pathways for protective CD8+ and CD4+ T cells. The Journal of biological chemistry. 2009; 284(14); 9184-9191. [PubMed: 19193636].
This particular nucleotide sequence has a premature stop codon in place of a well-conserved tryptophan codon at position 8712-8714 that truncates the HIV1 Nef protein sequence to a 123 amino acids-long N-terminal portion (not shown).
