Adaptive immunity is mediated by T- and B-cells, which are immune cells capable of developing pathogen-specific memory that confers immunological protection. Memory and effector functions of B- and T-cells are predicated on the recognition through specialized receptors of specific targets (antigens) in pathogens. More specifically, B- and T-cells recognize portions within their cognate antigens...

Delineation of the antigenic site, or epitope, recognized by an antibody can provide clues about functional vulnerabilities and resistance mechanisms, and can therefore guide antibody optimization and epitope-based vaccine design. Previously, we developed an algorithm for antibody-epitope prediction based on antibody neutralization of viral strains with diverse sequences and validated the algor...

conclusions hcv gpe2 is an ideal target for hcv vaccine. prediction of epitope immunogenicity and characterization on the basis of peptide sequences will be significantly helpful for development of a heterologous vaccine against hcv variants. results many b-cell and t-cell epitopes predicted in gpe2 were found conserved among hcv 3a genotypes whereas few were conserved in other genotypes antici...

The function of an antibody is intrinsically linked to the epitope it engages. Clonal clustering methods, based on sequence identity, are commonly used group antibodies that will bind same epitope. However, such methods neglect fact with highly diverse sequences can exhibit similar binding site geometries and engage common epitopes. In a previous study, we described SPACE1, method structurally ...

Objective(s):Brucellosis is a well-known domestic animal infectious disease, which is caused by Brucella bacterium. GroEL antigen increases Brucella survival and is one of the major antigens that stimulates the immune system. Hence, the objective of the present study was cloning and bioinformatics analysis of GroEL gene. Materials and Methods: The full-length open reading frame of this gene was...

Background: Hepatitis C virus (HCV) causes acute and chronic human hepatitis infections. Due to the high genetic diversity and high rates of mutations in the genetic material so far there is no approved vaccine against HCV. Materials and Methods: The aim of this study was to determination B and T cell conserved epitopes of E1 and E2 proteins from HCV and construction of a chimeric pepti...

Functional T-cell epitope discovery is a key process for the development of novel immunotherapies, particularly for cancer immunology. In silico epitope prediction is a common strategy to try to achieve this objective. However, this approach suffers from a significant rate of false-negative results and epitope ranking lists that often are not validated by practical experience. A high-throughput...