Targeting carbohydrate antigens in HIV vaccine development

Peptide mimotopes provide a strategy to augment human immunodeficiency virus 1 (HIV-1) specific carbohydrate reactive immune responses. Their antigenic and immunological properties will depend on the optimization of motif clustering and multimerization. We observe that structural variants of the same mimetic motif, linear versus cyclic, can be used to tune the properties of the antibodies elicited. The expansion of the database of mimotope sequence motifs can be increased by analyzing structures that bind to HIV directed monoclonal antibody 2G12 and the lectin Concanavalin A (Con A), fostering new mimotope designs. Such analysis indicates that these reagents bind to subsets of mannosyl antigens on the envelope (env) protein.