El-Manzalawy Yasser, Honavar Vasant
Department of Systems and Computer Engineering, Al-Azhar University, Egypt.
Immunome Res. 2010 Nov 3;6 Suppl 2(Suppl 2):S2. doi: 10.1186/1745-7580-6-S2-S2.
Identification of epitopes that invoke strong responses from B-cells is one of the key steps in designing effective vaccines against pathogens. Because experimental determination of epitopes is expensive in terms of cost, time, and effort involved, there is an urgent need for computational methods for reliable identification of B-cell epitopes. Although several computational tools for predicting B-cell epitopes have become available in recent years, the predictive performance of existing tools remains far from ideal. We review recent advances in computational methods for B-cell epitope prediction, identify some gaps in the current state of the art, and outline some promising directions for improving the reliability of such methods.
识别能引发B细胞强烈反应的表位是设计针对病原体的有效疫苗的关键步骤之一。由于表位的实验确定在成本、时间和精力方面都很昂贵，因此迫切需要用于可靠识别B细胞表位的计算方法。尽管近年来已经有几种用于预测B细胞表位的计算工具，但现有工具的预测性能仍远非理想。我们综述了B细胞表位预测计算方法的最新进展，找出了当前技术水平中的一些差距，并概述了一些提高此类方法可靠性的有前景的方向。
