To properly characterize protective polyclonal antibody responses, it is necessary to examine epitope specificity. Most antibody epitopes are conformational in nature and, thus, cannot be identified using synthetic linear peptides. Cyclic peptides can function as mimetics of conformational epitopes (termed mimotopes), thereby providing targets, which can be selected by immunoaffinity purificati...

Recombinant human erythropoietin (rhuEpo)-specific mouse monoclonal antibodies (MoAbs) have been produced and characterized. All antibodies were specifically reactive with rhuEpo in enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). Epitope exclusion studies showed three distinct epitope regions, A, B, and C, recognized by neutralizing MoAbs. An additional epitope region D was recognized by non-neutral...

Crystal structures of distinct mAbs that recognize a common epitope of a peptide Ag have been determined and analyzed in the unbound and bound forms. These Abs display dissimilar binding site structures in the absence of the Ag. The dissimilarity is primarily expressed in the conformations of complementarity-determining region H3, which is responsible for defining the epitope specificity. Inter...

Existing technologies allow isolating antigen-specific monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) from B cells. We devised a direct approach to isolate mAbs with predetermined conformational epitope specificity, using epitope mimetics (mimotopes) that reflect the three-dimensional structure of given antigen subdomains. We performed differential biopanning using bacteriophages encoding random peptide librarie...

A specific response of human serum neutralizing antibodies (nAb) to a conformational epitope as a result of vaccination of human subjects with the surface envelope glycoprotein (gp120) of HIV-1 has not previously been documented. Here, we used computational analysis to assess the epitope-specific responses of human subjects, which were immunized with recombinant gp120 immunogens in the VAX003 a...

A conformational epitope is composed of several discontinuous segments as antigenic determinants which are spatially close to each other in the three dimensional structure. These segments form the antigen which may bind with a specific receptor of the immune system, and play an important role in vaccine designs and immuno-biological experiments. Though there are two major types of epitopes: lin...

B-cell epitope is a group of residues which is on the surface of an antigen. It invokes humoral responses. Locating B-cell epitope is important for effective vaccine design, and the development of diagnostic reagents. Mimotope-based B-cell epitope prediction method is a kind of conformational B-cell epitope prediction, and the core idea of the method is mapping the mimotope sequences which are ...

BACKGROUND One of the major challenges in the field of vaccine design is to predict conformational B-cell epitopes in an antigen. In the past, several methods have been developed for predicting conformational B-cell epitopes in an antigen from its tertiary structure. This is the first attempt in this area to predict conformational B-cell epitope in an antigen from its amino acid sequence. RES...

Abstract Genetic engineering of T-cells using chimeric antigen receptors (CARs) has shown promise in the treatment relapsed/refractory B-cell leukemia. However, a significant percentage patients will eventually relapse, often due to emergence tumor cells expressing low levels target antigen. Previous research demonstrated that hinge domain CAR plays crucial role regulating cytotoxic capabilitie...

Human adenovirus type 4 (HAdV-4) is an epidemic virus that contributes to serious acute respiratory disease (ARD) in both pediatric and adult patients. However, no licensed drug or vaccine is currently available to the civilian population. The identification of neutralizing epitopes of HAdV-4 should allow the development of a novel antiviral vaccine and a novel gene transfer vector, and an effe...