Searching and mapping of B-cell epitopes in Bcipep database.

One of the major challenges in the field of subunit vaccine design is to identify the antigenic regions in an antigen, which can activate B cell. These antigenic regions are called B-cell epitopes. In this chapter, we describe how to use Bcipep, which is a database of experimentally determined linear B-cell epitopes of varying immunogenicity collected from literature and other publicly available databases. The current version of Bcipep database contains 3,031 entries that include 763 immunodominant, 1,797 immunogenic, and 471 null-immunogenic epitopes. The database provides a set of tools for analysis and extraction of data that includes keyword search, peptide mapping, and BLAST search. The database is available at http://www.imtech.res.in/raghava/bcipep/.