Natural epitope variants of the hepatitis C virus impair cytotoxic T lymphocyte activity

Figure 6 Antagonistic effect of NS3 peptide variants inhibiting specific cytolytic activity of specific CTL clones. A detailed inhibition profile is shown for CTL clones 1073 (A) and 1169 (C) in which target cells were pre-pulsed with 10 nmol/L of wild-type peptide, and then incubated at indicated ratios of variant to wild-type peptide concentrations (V:W). Wild-type peptides wt1131 and wt1169 were used as negative controls for experiments using CTL clone 1073, where only a single control (wt1131) was used for tests involving CTL clone 1169. Both data sets were determined at effector to target ratios of 20:1. Because of lack of material, a more simplified profile is shown for CTL clone 1131 (B) testing only a V:W ratio of 1:1 with wt1169 as negative control. All experiments were performed in duplicates.