Structural analysis of B-cell epitopes in antibody:protein complexes.

ABSTRACT: The binding of antigens to antibodies is one of the key events in an immune response against foreign molecules and is a critical element of several biomedical applications including vaccines and immunotherapeutics. For development of such applications, the identification of antibody binding sites (B-cell epitopes) is essential. However experimental epitope mapping is highly cost-intensive and computer-aided methods do in general have moderate performance. One major reason for this moderate performance is an incomplete understanding of what characterizes an epitope. To fill this gap, we here developed a novel framework for comparing and superimposing B-cell epitopes and applied it on a dataset of 107 non-similar antigen:antibody structures extracted from the PDB database. With the presented

SUBMITTER: Kringelum JV 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3461403 | biostudies-literature | 2013 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature