Bioinformatics Advance Access published online on October 31, 2007
Bioinformatics, doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btm493
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Pepitope: Epitope mapping from affinity-selected peptides
1Department of Cell Research and Immunology, George S. Wise Faculty of Life Sciences, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, 69978, 2 School of Computer Science, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv 69978, Israel, 3 Department of Microbiology, University of Massachusetts Amherst, MA 01003, USA.
*To whom correspondence should be addressed. Dr. Tal Pupko, E-mail: talp{at}post.tau.ac.il
| Abstract |
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Identifying the epitope to which an antibody binds is central for many immunological applications such as drug design and vaccine development. The Pepitope server is a web-based tool that aims at predicting discontinuous epitopes based on a set of peptides that were affinity-selected against a monoclonal antibody of interest. The server implements three different algorithms for epitope mapping: PepSurf, Mapitope, and a combination of the two. The rationale behind these algorithms is that the set of peptides mimics the genuine epitope in terms of physicochemical properties and spatial organization. When the three-dimensional structure of the antigen is known, the information in these peptides can be used to computationally infer the corresponding epitope. A user friendly web interface and a graphical tool that allows viewing the predicted epitopes were developed. Pepitope can also be applied for inferring other types of protein-protein interactions beyond the immunological context, and as a general tool for aligning linear sequences to a three-dimensional structure.
Availability: http://pepitope.tau.ac.il/
Contact: talp{at}post.tau.ac.il
Associate Editor: Prof. Alfonso Valencia
Received on August 12, 2007; revised on September 25, 2007; accepted on September 26, 2007