Prediction of Antibody Epitopes

Abstract

Antibodies recognize their cognate antigens in a precise and effective way. In order to do so, they target regions of the antigenic molecules that have specific features such as large exposed areas, presence of charged or polar atoms, specific secondary structure elements, and lack of similarity to self-proteins. Given the sequence or the structure of a protein of interest, several methods exploit such features to predict the residues that are more likely to be recognized by an immunoglobulin.

Here, we present two methods (BepiPred and DiscoTope) to predict linear and discontinuous antibody epitopes from the sequence and/or the three-dimensional structure of a target protein.