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Introduction
The prediction of allergenic proteins is becoming very important in present time due to use of modified proteins in foods (genetically modified foods), therapeutics, bio-pharmaceuticals etc. World Health Organization (WHO) and Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) realize the importance of prediction and proposed guidelines to assess the potential allergenicity of proteins. In past, number of approaches and methods has been developed to predict allergens; each has their own merits and demerits. In AlgPred a systematic attempt has been made to integrate various approaches in order to predict allergenic proteins with high accuracy.
The salient features of AlgPred server are,
- Algpred allows prediction of allergens based on similarity of known epitope with any region of protein.
- The mapping of IgE epitope(s) feature of server allows user to locate the position of epitope in their protein.
- Server search MEME/MAST allergen motifs using MAST and assign a protein allergen if it have any motif.
- Allows to predict allergens based on SVM modules using amino acid or dipeptide composition.
- It facilitates BLAST search against 2890 allergen-representative peptides (ARPs) obtained from Bjorklund et al 2005 and assign a protein allergen if it have a BLAST hit..
- Hybrid option of server allows to predict allergen using combined approach (SVMc + IgE epitope + ARPs BLAST + MAST).
World Health Organization (WHO) and Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) proposed guidelines to assess the potential allergenicity of protein are available from http://www.fao.org/es/ESN/food/pdf/allergygm.pdf.
Please cite following paper if you are using Algpred:
Saha, S. and Raghava, G.P.S. (2006) AlgPred: prediction of allergenic proteins and mapping of IgE epitopes. Nucleic Acids Research, Volume 34, W202-W209.
Abstract:
http://nar.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/34/suppl_2/W202?ijkey=FvK5uzLHi3Xvgdq&keytype=ref