Notice of Retraction: Analysis in silico of epitopes on 2009 pandemic H1N1 virus proteins

The World Health Organization (WHO) declared an end to the 2009 H1N1 pandemic globally on August 10, 2010, indicating H1N1 influenza virus has moved into the post-pandemic period. For better understanding the infection, it is necessary to analyze the molecular basis for immunity against new pandemic virus. With the help of Immune Epitope Database (IEDB), 18 B-cell epitopes and 339 T-cell epitopes have been found, more than double epitopes of the early research for this pandemic virus. 9 new epitopes (8 for T-cell and 1 for B-cell) that do not exist in the recent seasonal virus were determined. For B-cell responses, neutralizing epitopes are primarily located on the virion surface proteins HA and NA but in pandemic strains only a small part of epitopes in HA and NA for B-cell are conserved. The tridimensional structure analysis of epitopes helps us to understand that there is no apparent neutralizing antibody against the pandemic virus in the general human population after vaccination with seasonal influenza vaccine. On the other hand, the new epitopes to human could have role in protection from the subsequent infection from swine and avian influenza virus due to that the new virus contains the epitopes from swine and avian viruses, including the high virulent serotype H5N1.