Hotspot Hunter: a computational system for large-scale screening and selection of candidate immunological hotspots in pathogen p

Background: T-cell epitopes that promiscuously bind to multiple alleles of a human leukocyte antigen (HLA) supertype are prime targets for development of vaccines and immunotherapies because they are relevant to a large proportion of the human population. The presence of clusters of promiscuous T-cell epitopes, immunological hotspots, has been observed in several antigens. These clusters may be exploited to facilitate the development of epitope-based vaccines by selecting a small number of hotspots that can elicit all of the required T-cell activation functions. Given the large size of pathogen proteomes, including of variant strains, computational tools are necessary for automated screening and selection of immunological hotspots. Results: Hotspot Hunter is a web-based computational system for large-scale screening and selection of candidate immunological hotspots in pathogen proteomes through analysis of antigenic diversity. It allows screening and selection of hotspots specific to ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: BMCBI
• Authors: Guanglan Zhang, Asif M. Khan, Kellathur N. Srinivasan, A. T. Heiny, Kenneth X. Lee, Chee Keong Kwoh, J. Thomas August, Vladimir Brusic
• Keywords: BMCBI 2008, Candidate Immunological Hotspots, Immunological Hotspots, T-cell Epitopes