Poxvirus CD8+ T cell determinants aid smallpox vaccine design.

The article cites a study which states that the identification of poxvirus CD8+ T cell determinants enables the rational design and characterization of smallpox vaccines. Researcher David C. Tscharke at the U.S. National Institutes of Health and collaborators in the U.S. and Australia used a vaccinia virus (VACV) expression library containing each of the predicted 258 open reading frames to identify five peptide determinants that account for approximately half of the VACV-specific CD8+ T cell response in C57BL/6 mice. Tscharke and his coauthors published their study in the "Journal of Experimental Medicine."