Introduction
The identification and characterization of B-cell epitopes play an important role in vaccine design, immunodiagnostic tests, and antibody production. Therefore, computational tools for reliably predicting linear B-cell epitopes in protein sequences are highly desirable. Because it is often valuable to compare predictions of multiple methods, and consensus predictions are more reliable than individual predictions, the BCPREDS server allows users to choose the method for predicting B-cell epitopes among several developed prediction methods.
The current implementation of BCPREDS allows the user to select among three prediction methods: (i) our implementation of AAP method [Chen et al., 2007]; (ii) BCPred [EL-Manzalawy et al., 2008]; (iii) FBCPred [EL-Manzalawy et al., 2008b]. Users provide an antigen sequence and optionally can specify desired epitope length and specificity threshold. Results are returned in several user-friendly formats.
REFERENCES
Chen J, Liu H, Yang J, Chou K (2007) Prediction of linear B-cell epitopes using amino acid pair antigenicity scale. Amino Acids 33: 423-428.