Tertiary structure-based prediction of conformational B-cell epitopes through B factors.

ABSTRACT:

Motivation

B-cell epitope is a small area on the surface of an antigen that binds to an antibody. Accurately locating epitopes is of critical importance for vaccine development. Compared with wet-lab methods, computational methods have strong potential for efficient and large-scale epitope prediction for antigen candidates at much lower cost. However, it is still not clear which features are good determinants for accurate epitope prediction, leading to the unsatisfactory performance of existing prediction methods.

Method and results

We propose a much more accurate B-cell epitope prediction method. Our method uses a new feature B factor (obtained from X-ray crystallography), combined with other basic physicochemical, statistical, evolutionary and structural features of each r

SUBMITTER: Ren J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4058920 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature