For the development of an effective human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) vaccine, further insights are needed into the nature of the virus and how an effective immune response can be mounted against it. The development of technologies, such as major histocompatibility complex (MHC)/peptide tetramers, has enabled the immune response to HIV to be studied in more detail, and data on the immunology of HIV is accumulating at a rapid rate.

The HIV Molecular Immunology Database (http://hiv-web.lanl.gov/immunology/index.html), run by researchers in the Theoretical Biology and Biophysics Group at Los Alamos National Laboratory, enables the results obtained from numerous labs to be combined into a searchable database.

This regularly updated website, launched in 1995, contains annotated nucleotide and amino-acid alignment maps of HIV-1 and simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) cytotoxic and helper T-cell epitopes and antibody-binding sites. Comparisons made between the immunology data and the sequence data provide new insights into the host–pathogen relationship and the evolution of these viruses. In addition to the sequences, other useful information, such as the location of the sequence in the genome and how the epitope was experimentally defined, is also available.

The site also provides useful tools, designed by the experts in Los Alamos, for carrying out sequence analysis such as HIV–BLAST, Treemaker and Vespa. And, for those who prefer the printed page, the data are also available in the HIV Molecular Immunology Compendium, which is published annually.