Graph-theoretical formulation of the generalized epitope-based vaccine design problem
Fig 6
Comparison of mosaic and epitope mixture vaccines of different sizes.
Mosaic vaccines were much better than epitope mixtures or string-of-beads of the same length (blue), as long as the pathogens offer enough epitope variety. By enforcing an overlap between epitopes of eight amino acids (red), the vaccine did not improve after a certain length. This could be prevented by relaxing this requirement to only four amino acids (yellow). The vaccines are compared with respect to four metrics: immunogenicity (a), population coverage (b), pathogen coverage (c), and conservation (d). The experiment was repeated for each of the five bootstraps, and bars represent the resulting standard deviation. Note that these vaccines were not designed with pathogen coverage nor epitope conservation in mind; mosaics naturally reached higher values.