Figure 1

Deimmunization overview. We employ T-cell epitope predictors to score each 9-mer peptide for potential immunogenicity. In this example (staphylokinase residues 71-87; see the Results section), four peptides are deemed immunogenic, as they are predicted to be recognized by sever-al of the 8 most representative MHC II alleles. We employ sequence and structure analysis to identify for each position which residues are acceptable; only a few examples are shown. Our algorithms select a specified number of mutations (here two mutations, underlined in the variant) from the acceptable ones, so as to minimize the resulting epitope score. Note that a single substitution at a "promiscuous" amino acid can reduce recognition of multiple overlapping epitopes, and need not be at the so-called "anchor" position.