image: Nearly 10,000 unique IgG antibody chains were assembled into a phylogenetic tree and colored by the immunization strategy that gave rise to them. In order to display the tree in a single image, the tree has been folded and drawn in three dimensions, with individual sequences as nodes represented by colored squares on the X-Y plane and the branches extending upwards proportionally to the similarities of the sequences. The leaf colors blue, red, green and yellow indicate that the sequence came from a control, the addition of innate adjuvant 1, innate adjuvant 2, and a combination of the two respectively. The colors of leaf nodes whose sequence is present in multiple groups are blended proportional. The trees show branching of unique malaria antigen binders in families derived from B-cells that matured in response to the vaccination. The fact that the innate stimulant adjuvants give many more leaf nodes reflects that the addition of these adjuvants to the vaccine enables broader protection, which panned out in the functional readouts included in the manuscript. This image is Figure 3 from the paper. This image relates to a paper that appeared in the July 27, 2011, issue of Science Translational Medicine, published by AAAS. The paper, by Dr. S.R. Wiley of Imdaptive Inc. in Seattle, Wash., and colleagues, was titled, "Targeting TLRs Expands the Antibody Repertoire in Response to a Malaria Vaccine." view more
Credit: Image courtesy of Science/AAAS