This article is part of the supplement: Computational Vaccinology: State-of-the-art Assessments
Review
Recent advances in B-cell epitope prediction methods
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Corresponding authors: Yasser EL-Manzalawy yasser@iastate.edu - Vasant Honavar honavar@iastate.edu
1 Department of Systems and Computer Engineering, Al-Azhar University, Egypt
2 Department of Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence Research Laboratory, Center for Computational Intelligence, Learning, and Discovery, Iowa State University, USA
Immunome Research 2010, 6(Suppl 2):S2 doi:10.1186/1745-7580-6-S2-S2
Published: 3 November 2010Abstract
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.