The Endogenous And Crossreative Presentations Of Plasmoudm Falciparum CTL Epitopes In Human HLA Subtypes Specific Cell Lines

CD8+ cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTL) play a critical role in eradicating Plasmodium falciparum at the pre-erythrocyte stage of the parasite infection. Many interests have been transferred to CTL vaccine design aimed at blocking the pathogen life cycle. The efforts to develop a Plasmodium falciparum CTL vaccine has been complicated by the polymorphism of MHC class I molecules. It had been suggested that to construct a multiple CTL epitope vaccine would be helpful to solve the problem. Owing to the lack of suitable and affordable animal model for Plasmodium falciparm researches at present, a preliminary in vitro assay to predicate recombinant vaccine immunogenicity would be helpful and feasible.Recent researches indicated that some HLA class I molecules peptides showed overlapping peptide ligand anchor residues, the anchor residues is known as the peptide-binding motif. The HLA molecules that are characterized by same or similar peptide-binding motifs were defined as a supertype. It appears that all known HLA class I A and B alleles might be classified in one of nine supertypes. The peptide-binding motif shared by one supertypes HLA class I alleles was defined as supermotif. It had been demonstrated that the existence of broadly crossreactive peptides in a supertype HLA alleles. The definition of supermotif and supertype, has important implication for Plasomodium vaccine design. That is, instead of developing, a single peptide entity for each of HLA alleles, to attempt the identification of epitopes capable of binding multiple HLA type and avoid the complexities linked to development of a vaccine comprising a large number of epitopes.