Achievement

Epitopes in HIV's surface envelope glycoprotein (gp120) are well known to be differentially masked, either intrinsically, by glycans, or by occlusion by other protein regions, but the masking phenomenon has not previously been systematically assessed. IGERT trainee Alpna Agarwal in collaboration with COB faculty T. Cardozo have estimated the effective neutralization potential (EN) for several monoclonal antibodies via an interdisciplinary approach combining virologic neutralization data, structural biology epitope mapping, and bioinformatics masking score calculation.