DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THE INVENTION The term "peptide" as used herein refers to a molecular chain of amino acids with a biological activity, and does not refer to a specific length of the product. Thus inter alia, proteins, fusion-proteins or -peptides oligopeptides and polypeptides are included. If required peptides according to the invention can be modified in vivo or in vitro, for example by glycosylation, amidation, carboxylation or phosphorylation. Functional variants like, for example, acid addition salts, amides, esters, and specifically C-terrminal esters, and N-acyl derivatives of the peptides according to the invention are therefore also considered part of the present invention. It will be understood that for the particular proteins or polypeptides embraced herein, natural variations can also exist. These variations may be demonstrated by (an) amino acid difference(s) in the overall sequence or by deletions, substitutions, insertions, inversions or additions of (an) amino acid(s) in said sequence. Amino acid substitutions from which can be expected that they do not essentially alter biological and immunological activities, have been described. Amino acid replacements between related amino acids or replacements which have occurred frequently in evolution are, inter alia Ser/Ala, Ser/Gly, Asp/Gly, Asp/Asn, Ile/Val (see Dayhof, M. D. , Atlas of protein sequence and structure, Nat. Biomed. Res. Found. , Washington D. C. , 1978, vol. 5, suppl. 3). Based on this information Lipman and Pearson developed a method for rapid and sensitive protein comparison (Science 227, 1435-1441, 1985) and determining the functional similarity between homologous proteins. The term "fragment" as used herein means an amino acid sequence comprising a subsequence of a peptide of the invention. Said fragment is a peptide having one or more immunogenic determinants of the VCA-p18 or VCA-p40 protein. Fragments can inter alia be produced by enzymatic cleavage of precursor molecules, using restriction endonucleases for the DNA and proteases for the polypeptides
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