Mayers Carl, Duffield Melanie, Rowe Sonya, Miller Julie, Lingard Bryan, Hayward Sarah, Titball Richard W
Dstl, Porton Down, Salisbury, Wiltshire SP4 0JQ, United Kingdom.
Comp Funct Genomics. 2003;4(5):468-78. doi: 10.1002/cfg.319.
Many vaccines have been developed from live attenuated forms of bacterial pathogens or from killed bacterial cells. However, an increased awareness of the potential for transient side-effects following vaccination has prompted an increased emphasis on the use of sub-unit vaccines, rather than those based on whole bacterial cells. The identification of vaccine sub-units is often a lengthy process and bioinformatics approaches have recently been used to identify candidate protein vaccine antigens. Such methods ultimately offer the promise of a more rapid advance towards preclinical studies with vaccines. We have compared the properties of known bacterial vaccine antigens against randomly selected proteins and identified differences in the make-up of these two groups. A computer algorithm that exploits these differences allows the identification of potential vaccine antigen candidates from pathogenic bacteria on the basis of their amino acid composition, a property inherently associated with sub-cellular location.
许多疫苗是由减毒活细菌病原体或灭活细菌细胞研制而成。然而，人们越来越意识到接种疫苗后可能出现短暂副作用，这促使人们更加重视使用亚单位疫苗，而非基于完整细菌细胞的疫苗。疫苗亚单位的鉴定通常是一个漫长的过程，近年来生物信息学方法已被用于鉴定候选蛋白疫苗抗原。此类方法最终有望更快推进疫苗的临床前研究。我们将已知细菌疫苗抗原的特性与随机选择的蛋白质进行了比较，并确定了这两组蛋白质组成的差异。一种利用这些差异的计算机算法能够根据潜在疫苗抗原候选物的氨基酸组成来识别它们，而氨基酸组成这一特性与亚细胞定位内在相关。
