We unveil for the first time that pancreatic cancer cells (PANC-1) and secreted exosomes express MUC1 bearing cancer-relevant dynamic epitopes recognized specifically by an anti-MUC1 antibody (SN-131).

Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) with pandemic potential is a major worldwide threat to public health. However, vaccine development for this pathogen lags behind as immunity associated with protection is currently largely unknown. In this study, an immunoinformatics-driven genome-wide screening strategy of vaccine targets was performed to thoroughly screen the vital and e...

Identification of B-cell epitopes in target antigens is a critical step in epitope-driven vaccine design, immunodiagnostic tests, and antibody production. B-cell epitopes could be linear, i.e., a contiguous amino acid sequence fragment of an antigen, or conformational, i.e., amino acids that are often not contiguous in the primary sequence but appear in close proximity within the folded 3D anti...

In scientific literature, there are many programs that predict linear B-cell epitopes from a protein sequence. Each program generates multiple B-cell epitopes that can be individually studied. This paper defines a function called that combines results from five different prediction programs concerning the linear B-cell epitopes (ie., BebiPred, EPMLR, BCPred, ABCPred and Emini Prediction) fo...

It is conventionally pictured that extracellular antigens are engulfed by antigen presenting cells (APCs) via endocytosis. Then the antigens are digested in lysoendosome to produce peptide epitopes which are loaded to class II major histocompatibility complex (MHC-II) before recycling back onto cell membrane. On the other hand, intracellular antigens are processed by proteasome and the peptide ...

Disease susceptibility for type 1 diabetes is strongly associated with the inheritance of specific HLA alleles. However, conventional allele frequency analysis can miss HLA associations because many alleles are rare. In addition, disparate alleles that have similar peptide-binding sites, or shared epitopes, can be missed. To identify the HLA shared epitopes associated with diabetes, we analyzed...

BACKGROUND Loss of antibody reactivity against linear epitopes of parvovirus B19 (B19) capsid proteins VP1 and VP2 occurs after infection; however, it is unclear whether B cell memory is established against linear epitopes. METHODS B cell enzyme-linked immunospot assay was used to evaluate B19-specific B cell memory in volunteer donors (n=22). RESULTS B cell memory is maintained against con...

The molecular characterization of the epitope repertoire on herpes simplex virus (HSV) antigens would greatly expand our knowledge of HSV immunity and improve immune interventions against herpesvirus infections. HSV glycoprotein D (gD) is an immunodominant viral coat protein and is considered an excellent vaccine candidate antigen. By using the TEPITOPE prediction algorithm, we have identified ...

Control of hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection could be influenced by the timing and magnitude of CD4+ T cell responses against individual epitopes. We characterized CD4+ T cells targeting seven Pan troglodytes (Patr) class II-restricted epitopes during primary and secondary HCV infections of a chimpanzee. All Patr-DR-restricted HCV epitopes bound multiple human HLA-DR molecules, indicating the p...

The aim of the present study was to predict the secondary structure and the T- and B-cell epitopes of the Echinococcus multilocularis Emy162 antigen, in order to reveal the dominant epitopes of the antigen. The secondary structure of the protein was analyzed using the Gamier-Robson method, and the improved self-optimized prediction method (SOPMA) server. The T- and B-cell epitopes of Emy162 wer...