Why make mosaics?
Mosaics proteins are generally vaccine candidates. Shorter mosaic peptides can be used to assay T-cell specificity in EliSpot assays. Mosaic proteins will give equal or better coverage of potential epitopes (k-mers) than is possible from the same number of natural proteins or from a consensus sequence. Mosaics will generally have k-mer coverage superior to consensus sequences, and similar to that of peptide beads-on-a-string. However, because mosaics have only natural k-mers in natural local contexts, intracellular processing of mosaics for MHC presentation is likely to more closely resemble processing of viral proteins in natural infection.
