CED: a conformational epitope database

doi:10.1186/1471-2172-7-7

BMC Immunology

Volume 7

Viewing options:

Abstract
Full text
PDF (1.5MB)

Associated material:

Related literature:

Articles citing this article
on BioMed Central
on Google Scholar
on PubMed Central
Other articles by authors
on Google Scholar

Huang J
Honda W

on PubMed

Huang J
Honda W
Related articles/pages
on Google

on Google Scholar

on PubMed

Tools:

Post to:

Database

CED: a conformational epitope database

Jian Huang¹^,2 and Wataru Honda¹

¹Bioinformatics Center, Institute for Chemical Research, Kyoto University, Uji, Kyoto 611-0011, Japan

²School of Life Science and Technology, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, China

author email corresponding author email

BMC Immunology 2006, 7:7doi:10.1186/1471-2172-7-7


Published:	7 April 2006

Abstract

Background

Antigen epitopes provide valuable information useful for disease prevention, diagnosis, and treatment. Recently, more and more databases focusing on different types of epitopes have become available. Conformational epitopes are an important form of epitope formed by residues that are sequentially discontinuous but close together in three-dimensional space. These epitopes have implicit structural information, making them attractive for both theoretical and applied biomedical research. However, most existing databases focus on linear rather than conformational epitopes.

Description

We describe CED, a special database of well defined conformational epitopes. CED provides a collection of conformational epitopes and related information including the residue make up and location of the epitope, the immunological property of the epitope, the source antigen and corresponding antibody of the epitope. All entries in this database are manually curated from articles published in peer review journals. The database can be browsed or searched through a user-friendly web interface. Most epitopes in CED can also be viewed interactively in the context of their 3D structures. In addition, the entries are also hyperlinked to various databases such as Swiss-Prot, PDB, KEGG and PubMed, providing wide background information.

Conclusion

A conformational epitope database called CED has been developed as an information resource for investigators involved in both theoretical and applied immunology research. It complements other existing specialised epitope databases. The database is freely available at http://web.kuicr.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~ced webcite