Ethical approval was granted by the Ethical Review Committee of the University of Sri Jayawardanapura, Sri Lanka and the Oxfordshire Ethics committee of the University of Oxford. Informed written consent was obtained from all study

participants. Peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC) were obtained from fresh heparinized blood by Ficoll-Hypaque density gradient centrifugation. They were then resuspended in RPMI-1640 plus 10% fetal calf serum (FCS) for ex-vivo enzyme-linked immunospot (ELISPOT) assays and ex-vivo intracellular cytokine staining (ICS) assays and in RPMI-1640 plus 10% human serum for cell cultures. Full-length or near full-length polyprotein sequences for all DENV serotypes (taxonomy i.d. 12637) were downloaded from NCBI (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/). The protein sequences were used to construct two Basic Local Alignment Search Tool Atezolizumab in vitro (BLAST) databases [16] for each serotype. One contained only the serotype-specific proteins and a second contained all proteins from the flaviviridae (taxonomy i.d. 11050) excluding that

serotype’s proteins. A series of BLAST searches and subsequent analyses using custom perl scripts were used to identify regions of the polyprotein sequence that were unique to a given serotype and a conserved within that serotype. Conservation of polyprotein regions across members of VX-809 molecular weight the serogroups was confirmed using FUZZPRO searches [17] with a maximum of five mismatches. Using this approach, 19 serotype-specific conserved regions were identified across all DENV serotypes. For identified regions of the DENVs, 35 20-mer peptides overlapping by 10 amino acids were synthesized for DENV-2 and DENV-3, 23 20-mer peptides for DENV-1 and 28 20-mer peptides for DENV-4. All peptides that were more than 20 aa long, shown in Table 1, were made into 20-mers which overlap by 10 aa. Synthesis was performed in-house in an automated synthesizer using 9-fluorenylmethyloxycarbonyl (Fmoc) chemistry. The purity of the peptides was determined to be greater than 90% by high-pressure liquid chromatography analysis and mass spectrometry. The source region sequences for the four DENVs are listed in Table 1. Cultured ELISPOT assays were

performed on 20 of 24 healthy dengue immune adults. PBMC from each donor were incubated with the peptides of each DV serotype peptide pool consisting of all overlapping AZD9291 in vitro peptides. Cultured ELISPOT assays were performed as described previously [18]. Background (cells plus media) was subtracted and data expressed as number of spot-forming units (SFU) per 106 PBMC. Peptides of each DENV serotype were arranged into nine peptide pools, each pool consisting of five to eight peptides, with each peptide present in two different pools. Therefore, each peptide would drive a response in two different pools. In each instance, once a peptide was found to be antigenic by using the peptide matrix, it was retested with the identified peptide for confirmation of the response.