Software
Epitopia: a web-server for predicting B-cell epitopes
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* Corresponding author: Tal Pupko talp@post.tau.ac.il
1 Department of Cell Research and Immunology, George S Wise Faculty of Life Sciences, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv 69978, Israel
2 Department of Zoology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z4, Canada
3 Department of Microbiology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003, USA
BMC Bioinformatics 2009, 10:287 doi:10.1186/1471-2105-10-287
Published: 14 September 2009Abstract
Background
Detecting candidate B-cell epitopes in a protein is a basic and fundamental step in many immunological applications. Due to the impracticality of experimental approaches to systematically scan the entire protein, a computational tool that predicts the most probable epitope regions is desirable.
Results
The Epitopia server is a web-based tool that aims to predict immunogenic regions in either a protein three-dimensional structure or a linear sequence. Epitopia implements a machine-learning algorithm that was trained to discern antigenic features within a given protein. The Epitopia algorithm has been compared to other available epitope prediction tools and was found to have higher predictive power. A special emphasis was put on the development of a user-friendly graphical interface for displaying the results.
Conclusion
Epitopia is a user-friendly web-server that predicts immunogenic regions for both a protein structure and a protein sequence. Its accuracy and functionality make it a highly useful tool. Epitopia is available at http://epitopia.tau.ac.il webcite and includes extensive explanations and example predictions.