In this study, we tried to systemically review all the possible tools developed in the past for the prediction of B-cell epitopes.
Challanges in B-cell epitope prediction
In the post-genomic era, where most of the pathogens have been sequenced, there is a need for identifying antibody interacting residues from the complexes of antigen-antibody or all possible epitopes from an antigen via epitope mapping for various immunological applications. Experimental techniques remain the gold standard for identifying epitopes carried out by various methods, including X-ray crystallography, western blotting, nuclear magnetic resonance(NMR), mutagenesis, overlapping peptide synthesis, antigen fragmentation, enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) and peptide microarray. Bioinformatics has greatly contributed in the development of immunoinformatics, which involves the application of computational methods in immunology to unveil structures of antibody, B-cell, T-cell, and allergen, prediction of MHC binding, modelling of epitopes, and analysis of immune networks. It was also reported that computational methods could significantly reduce the epitope prediction time and costs of vaccine development . The primary purpose of this review is to provide researchers with general knowledge about existing methods of B-cell epitope mapping and a short overview on epitope databases, recently developed prediction methods and publicly available tools.
