Frequent associations between CTL and T-Helper epitopes in HIV-1 genomes and implications for multi-epitope vaccine designs

Table 5 Nucleotide substitution rates among different epitope and non-epitope regions.

	dN	SE^#	dS	SE	P-value*
Associated epitopes	0.01062	0.00952	0.20969	0.07091	< 0.001
Non-associated epitopes	0.02387	0.02537	0.24220	0.12666	< 0.001
Not included epitopes	0.10532	0.01277	0.29085	0.04305	< 0.001
Non-epitopes	0.09793	0.01653	0.27329	0.04665	< 0.001

Average pairwise number of nonsynonymous (d_N) and synonymous (d_S) substitutions per nonsynonymous and synonymous site, respectively, estimated at different categories of epitope and non-epitope regions among reference sequences of M group are given.
^# Standard errors were estimated with 100 bootstrap replications in MEGA4.
* In pairwise t-tests, the null hypothesis of dS = dN was rejected in all four comparisons.

ISSN: 1471-2180