Relevant B Cell Epitopes in Allergic Disease

Relevant B cell epitopes in allergic disease.

The 3-dimensional structure of an allergen defines the accessible parts on the surface of the molecule or epitopes that interact with antibodies. Mapping the antigenic determinants for IgE antibody binding has been pursued through strategies based on the use of overlapping synthetic peptides, recombinant allergenic fragments or unfolded allergens. These approaches led to the identification of m...

Epitope Mapping: B-cell Epitopes

Immunoglobulin molecules are folded in a way that assembles sequences from the variable regions of both the heavy and light chains into a surface feature (comprised of up to six complementarity-determining regions (CDRs)) that is complementary in shape to a surface structure on the antigen. These two surface features, the ‘paratope’ on the antibody and the ‘epitope’ on the antigen, may have a c...

Hepatitis B virus core protein mutations are concentrated in B cell epitopes in progressive disease and in T helper cell epitopes during clinical remission.

The distribution and temporal and clinical features of amino acid substitutions of the core protein of hepatitis B (HB) virus were analyzed, using at least 2 sequential samples from 27 patients. Six patients seroconverted from HBe antigen (HBeAg)-positive to anti-HBe-positive (3 went into remission), and 21 were continuously anti-HBe positive with progressive hepatitis. Precore mutations, which...

Predicting flexible length linear B-cell epitopes.

Identifying B-cell epitopes play an important role in vaccine design, immunodiagnostic tests, and antibody production. Therefore, computational tools for reliably predicting B-cell epitopes are highly desirable. We explore two machine learning approaches for predicting flexible length linear B-cell epitopes. The first approach utilizes four sequence kernels for determining a similarity score be...

Characterization of the B Cell Epitopes