An important issue for the performance and specificity of an antibody is the nature of the binding to its protein target, including if the recognition involves linear or conformational epitopes. Here, we dissect polyclonal sera by creating epitope-specific antibody fractions using a combination of epitope mapping and an affinity capture approach involving both synthesized peptides and recombina...

MOTIVATION The conformational B-cell epitopes are the specific sites on the antigens that have immune functions. The identification of conformational B-cell epitopes is of great importance to immunologists for facilitating the design of peptide-based vaccines. As an attempt to narrow the search for experimental validation, various computational models have been developed for the epitope predict...

The factors that influence the intracellular location(s) of MHC class II-restricted epitope loading remain poorly understood. We present evidence that two I-Ed-restricted epitopes of the influenza hemagglutinin (HA) molecule, termed site 1 (S1; encompassing amino acid residues 107-119) and site 3 (S3; encompassing amino acid residues 302-313), are generated in distinct endocytic compartments. B...

Cell lysis with mild detergent is commonly used with cultured animal cells. If low detergent concentrations are sufficient to cause cell lysis (e.g., 1% Nonidet P-40 [NP-40] or 1% Triton X-100), this method can be gentler to the protein of interest than mechanical homogenization methods. The choice of detergent must be tailored to the nature of the epitope recognized by the immunoprecipitating ...

Hypervariable loops of HIV-1 Env protein gp120 are speculated to play roles in the conformational transition of Env to the receptor binding-induced metastable state. Structural analysis of full-length Env-based immunogens, containing the entire V2 loop, displayed tighter association between gp120 subunits, resulting in a smaller trimeric diameter than constructs lacking V2. A prominent basal qu...

The highly conserved C-terminus of the M protein of group A streptococcus (GAS) is a promising vaccine candidate. An epitope within the conserved C-terminus of the M protein, peptide 145 (a 20-mer with the sequence: LRRDLDASREAKKQVEKALE), has been defined which is the target of opsonic antibodies in both humans and mice, and is recognized by the sera of most adults living in areas of high strep...

Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) is the most common cause of serious viral bronchiolitis in infants, young children, and the elderly. Currently, there is not an FDA-approved vaccine available for RSV, though the mAb palivizumab is licensed to reduce the incidence of RSV disease in premature or at-risk infants. The palivizumab epitope is a well-characterized, approximately 24-aa helix-loop-heli...

Disease-related amyloid fibrils appear to share a common, but poorly understood, structure. We describe here the generation and preliminary characterization of two conformation-specific mAbs, WO1 and WO2, that bind to the amyloid fibril state of the Alzheimer's peptide A beta(1-40) but not to its soluble, monomeric state. Surprisingly, these Abs also bind to other disease-related amyloid fibril...

Identification of epitopes which invoke strong humoral responses is an essential issue in the field of immunology. Localizing epitopes by experimental methods is expensive in terms of time, cost, and effort; therefore, computational methods feature for its low cost and high speed was employed to predict B-cell epitopes. In this paper, we review the recent advance of bioinformatics resources and...