B-cell epitope prediction through a graph model

摘要

BackgroundPrediction of B-cell epitopes from antigens is useful to understand the immune basis of antibody-antigen recognition, and is helpful in vaccine design and drug development. Tremendous efforts have been devoted to this long-studied problem, however, existing methods have at least two common limitations. One is that they only favor prediction of those epitopes with protrusive conformations, but show poor performance in dealing with planar epitopes. The other limit is that they predict all of the antigenic residues of an antigen as belonging to one single epitope even when multiple non-overlapping epitopes of an antigen exist.