Bioinformatics Advance Access originally published online on December 6, 2006
Bioinformatics 2007 23(4):504-506; doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btl621
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AllerTool: a web server for predicting allergenicity and allergic cross-reactivity in proteins
Institute for Infocomm Research, 21 Heng Mui Keng Terrace Singapore 119613
1 Department of Biological Sciences, National University of Singapore 14 Science Drive 4, Singapore 117543
*To whom correspondence should be addressed.
| Abstract |
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Summary: Assessment of potential allergenicity and patterns of cross-reactivity is necessary whenever novel proteins are introduced into human food chain. Current bioinformatic methods in allergology focus mainly on the prediction of allergenic proteins, with no information on cross-reactivity patterns among known allergens. In this study, we present AllerTool, a web server with essential tools for the assessment of predicted as well as published cross-reactivity patterns of allergens. The analysis tools include graphical representation of allergen cross-reactivity information; a local sequence comparison tool that displays information of known cross-reactive allergens; a sequence similarity search tool for assessment of cross-reactivity in accordance to FAO/WHO Codex alimentarius guidelines; and a method based on support vector machine (SVM). A 10-fold cross-validation results showed that the area under the receiver operating curve (AROC) of SVM models is 0.90 with 86.00% sensitivity (SE) at specificity (SP) of 86.00%.
Availability: AllerTool is freely available at http://research.i2r.a-star.edu.sg/AllerTool/
Contact: zhzhang{at}i2r.a-star.edu.sg
Associate Editor: John Quackenbush
Received on August 21, 2006; revised on November 23, 2006; accepted on December 5, 2006
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