Predicting continuous epitopes in proteins

Abstract

The ability to predict antigenic sites on proteins is crucial for the production of synthetic peptide vaccines and synthetic peptide probes of antibody structure. Large number of amino acid propensity scales based on various properties of the antigenic sites like hydrophilicity, flexibility/mobility, turns and bends have been proposed and tested previously. However these methods are not very accurate in predicting epitopes and non-epitope regions. We propose algorithms that combine 14 best performing individual propensity scales and give better prediction accuracy as compared to individual scales.