BACKGROUND Multiple sclerosis (MS) is the most common autoimmune disease of the central nervous system (CNS). The main cause of the MS is yet to be revealed, but the most probable theory is based on the molecular mimicry that concludes some infections in the activation of T cells against brain auto-antigens that initiate the disease cascade. OBJECTIVES The Purpose of this research is the pred...

T-cell receptors (TCR) play an important role in the adaptive immune system as they recognize pathogen- or cancer-based epitopes and thus initiate the cell-mediated immune response. Therefore there exists a growing interest in the optimization of TCRs for medical purposes like adoptive T-cell therapy. However, the molecular mechanisms behind T-cell signaling are still predominantly unknown. For...

We present a model for predicting HLA class I restricted CTL epitopes. In contrast to almost all other work in this area, we train a single model on epitopes from all HLA alleles and supertypes, yet retain the ability to make epitope predictions for specific HLA alleles. We are therefore able to leverage data across all HLA alleles and/or their supertypes, automatically learning what informatio...

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...

Identification of epitopes that invoke strong responses from B-cells is one of the key steps in designing effective vaccines against pathogens. Because experimental determination of epitopes is expensive in terms of cost, time, and effort involved, there is an urgent need for computational methods for reliable identification of B-cell epitopes. Although several computational tools for predictin...

Objective: Coccidioidomycosis is a life threatening human respiratory disease caused by Original Article EPITOPE PREDICTION AND STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS OF PRA ANTIGEN OF COCCIDIOIDES PRASHANT SAXENA, JEMMY CHRISTY. H* Department of Bioinformatics, Sathyabama University,Chennai 119, India. Email: [email protected] Coccidioides immitis and C. posadasii. As the incidence of symptomatic Coccidioidom...

Peptide-based vaccines, in which small peptides derived from target proteins (eptiopes) are used to provoke an immune reaction, have attracted considerable attention recently as a potential means both of treating infectious diseases and promoting the destruction of cancerous cells by a patient's own immune system. With the availability of large sequence databases and computers fast enough for r...

Dermatophagoides farinae (Der f), one of the main species of house dust mites, produces more than 30 allergens. A recently identified allergen belonging to the alpha-tubulin protein family, Der f 33, has not been characterized in detail. In this study, we used bioinformatics tools to construct the secondary and tertiary structures and predict the B and T cell epitopes of Der f 33. First, protei...

We report the efficient identification of four human histocompatibility leukocyte antigen (HLA)-A(*)0201-presented cytotoxic T lymphocyte (CTL) epitopes in the tumor-associated antigen PRAME using an improved "reverse immunology" strategy. Next to motif-based HLA-A(*)0201 binding prediction and actual binding and stability assays, analysis of in vitro proteasome-mediated digestions of polypepti...