Graph-theoretical formulation of the generalized epitope-based vaccine design problem
Fig 8
Comparison of mosaic vaccines optimized for different objectives.
Here we designed mosaics of varying amino acid length (on the x axis) while optimizing for conservation (blue), immunogenicity (red), and pathogen coverage (yellow). The plots compare the vaccines in terms of conservation (a), immunogenicity (b), pathogen coverage (c), and population coverage (d). For longer vaccines, optimizing for pathogen coverage only gives modest improvements on the mosaics optimized for immunogenicity in terms of coverage, and does not increase conservation by much. When optimized for, conservation is considerably higher but becomes harder to improve as the vaccine becomes longer, due to the fact that few epitopes are well conserved and highly immunogenic at the same time. Average of five runs, standard deviation on the error bars.