Determinants of Antigenicity and Specificity in immune response for Protein Sequences

Background: Target specific antibodies are pivotal for the design of vaccines, immunodiagnostic tests, studies on proteomics for cancer biomarker discovery, identification of protein-DNA and other interactions, and small and large biochemical assays. Therefore, it is important to understand the properties of protein sequences that are important for antigenicity and to identify small peptide epitopes and large regions in the linear sequence of the proteins whose utilization result in specific antibodies. Results: Our analysis using protein properties suggested that sequence composition combined with evolutionary information and predicted secondary structure, as well as solvent accessibility is sufficient to predict successful peptide epitopes. The antigenicity and the specificity in immune response were also found to depend on the epitope length. We trained the B-Cell Epitope Oracle (BEOracle), a support vector machine (SVM) classifier, for the identification of continuous B-Cell epito...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: BMCBI
• Authors: Yulong Wang, Wenjun Wu, Nicolas N. Negre, Kevin P. White, Cheng Li, Parantu K. Shah
• Keywords: Biometrics, BMCBI 2011, Cell Epitopes, Peptide Epitopes, Support Vector Machine