Adjuvants play a vital role in immunization particularly in case of epitope-based vaccines. A variety of bacterially derived adjuvants have been tested on humans that include bacterial toxins, cell wall components, lipopolysaccharides and nucleic acids particularly double stranded RNA and CpG dinucleotide containing single stranded DNA. Immunomodulatory oligodeoxynucleotides (IMODNs) constitute a relatively new class of adjuvants that might play a promising role in future vaccines.

‘VaccineDA’ has been made available to the scientific community as a webserver in order to assist the experimentalists in designing better IMODN based adjuvants using sequence information of the oligonucleotides. The models used in prediction have been developed on experimentally validated IMODNs using different Datasets.

Utilities in VaccineDA

Some of the utilities provided in the webserver are
1) OLIGONUCLEOTIDE: Allows the user to determine whether the query oligonucleotide(s) are IMODNs or not.
2) DNASCAN: Facilitates in determining the immunomodulatory stretches within the query sequence(s).
3) VIRTUAL SCREENING: Generates position specific mutants of the query oligonucleotide and predicts whether the mutant is IMODN or not.
4) DIGEST: Extracts the fragments generated by ‘virtual’ digestion of the query DNA sequence by the user selected restriction enzymes and predicts whether each of the fragment is an IMODN.