Figure 3

Escape prevalence in early infection correlates with longitudinal first-year escape rates. A total of 27 HLA-associated polymorphisms in Gag (orange), Pol (green) and Nef (purple) occurring within optimally defined CTL epitopes, for which first-year epitope-specific rates of escape were previously published [13], were investigated. A significant positive correlation is observed between the proportion of persons expressing the restricting HLA and harboring the relevant polymorphism (“proportion escaped”) in early infection and the published first-year epitope escape rate, providing proof-of-concept that the relative timecourse of early escape in HIV-1 can be inferred using cross-sectional methods. In the case where a given epitope contained multiple HLA-restricted polymorphic sites, the site exhibiting the maximum “proportion escaped” was used. For figure clarity, only a subset of well-known epitopes are labeled for interest.