Structural Stability and Immunogenicity of Peptides

Statement I hereby confirm that this thesis is my own work and that I have documented all sources used. Acknowledgements First of all I would like to express my gratitude to Prof. Dr. Hans-Peter Lenhof, who provided me with a relevant and challenging subject to work on. Whenever needed he was available for guidance and support, including questions unrelated to the topics of this thesis. was an advisor I would recommend to any other student. She always kept track of things and was of great help in terms of C++ programming and many other questions of detail, while remaining seemingly endlessly patient. Also, she gave me invaluable advice when revising my thesis. Many thanks go to Dr. Andreas Hildebrandt, who helped me install BALL and kindly shared his profound software and programming knowledge, as well as his deep understanding of the biological processes underlying the subject of this thesis. I appreciate having been pointed to immunogenically interesting proteins by courtesy of Prof. Furthermore I thank Karin Jostock from the Center for Bioinformatics' secretariat and examination office. She is the most friendly and helpful secretary I have ever met. I am indebted to Philipp Kiszka, software developer, and the graphic artists Marcus Fröhner and Robert Jung. Philipp's advice helped me bring the webserver alive and the two designers gave the user interface a pleasant look. I want to gratefully mention the developers standing behind the open source software I used during the process of working out my bachelor's thesis (Apache, BALL, Collabtive, Open Flash Chart, Open Office Suite – to only mention a few). Finally this thesis would have been much harder to write without occasional distraction and recreation in form of telephone calls from my grandmother, and it would have been impossible without the support and patience of my fiancé Philipp and my parents.