The feasibility of producing a peptide diagnostic kit for the detection of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV, the causative agent of AIDS, will be examined. Up to 400 peptides, produced by the simultaneous multiple peptide methodology, will be screened for antigenic response to antibodies present in HIV positive human serum samples. The sequences of these peptides will scan the entire sequences present in the HIV proteins p24 and gp41. The object will be to find all non-tertiary epitopes, and to optimize (in terms of sequence and length) each antigenically active peptide for the detection of antibodies. It is anticipated that a kit of optimized peptides could perform well in detecting nearly 100% of HIV positive samples, and in addition that subsets of optimized peptides could be useful in prognosis, and in obtaining a more detailed dissection of the human immune response to HIV.
