Conformational B-Cell Epitope Prediction on Antigen Protein Structures: A Review of Current Algorithms and Comparison with Common Binding Site Prediction Methods

Authors

Bo Yao, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow
Dandan Zheng, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Shide Liang, Osaka UniversityFollow
Chi Zhang, University of Nebraska - LincolnFollow

Date of this Version

2013

Citation

Yao B, Zheng D, Liang S, Zhang C (2013) Conformational B-Cell Epitope Prediction on Antigen Protein Structures: A Review of Current Algorithms and Comparison with Common Binding Site Prediction Methods. PLoS ONE 8(4): e62249. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0062249

Comments

Copyright 2013 Yao et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

Accurate prediction of B-cell antigenic epitopes is important for immunologic research and medical applications, but compared with other bioinformatic problems, antigenic epitope prediction is more challenging because of the extreme variability of antigenic epitopes, where the paratope on the antibody binds specifically to a given epitope with high precision. In spite of the continuing efforts in the past decade, the problem remains unsolved and therefore still attracts a lot of attention from bioinformaticists. Recently, several discontinuous epitope prediction servers became available, and it is intriguing to review all existing methods and evaluate their performances on the same benchmark. In addition, these methods are also compared against common binding site prediction algorithms, since they have been frequently used as substitutes in the absence of good epitope prediction methods.