Prediction of conformational B-cell epitopes from 3D structures by random forests with a distance-based feature

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Antigen-antibody interactions are key events in immune system, which provide important clues to the immune processes and responses. In Antigen-antibody interactions, the specific sites on the antigens that are directly bound by the B-cell produced antibodies are well known as B-cell epitopes. The identification of epitopes is a hot topic in bioinformatics because of their potential use in the epitope-based drug design. Although most B-cell epitopes are discontinuous (or conformational), insufficient effort has been put into the conformational epitope prediction, and the performance of existing methods is far from satisfaction.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>In order to develop the high-accuracy model, we focus on some possible aspects concerning the prediction performance, including the impact of interior residues, different contributions of adjacent residues, and the imbalanced data which contain much more non-epitope residues than epitope residues. In order to address above issues, we take following strategies. Firstly, a concept of 'thick surface patch' instead of 'surface patch' is introduced to describe the local spatial context of each surface residue, which considers the impact of interior residue. The comparison between the thick surface patch and the surface patch shows that interior residues contribute to the recognition of epitopes. Secondly, statistical significance of the distance distribution difference between non-epitope patches and epitope patches is observed, thus an adjacent residue distance feature is presented, which reflects the unequal contributions of adjacent residues to the location of binding sites. Thirdly, a bootstrapping and voting procedure is adopted to deal with the imbalanced dataset. Based on the above ideas, we propose a new method to identify the B-cell conformational epitopes from 3D structures by combining conventional features and the proposed feature, and the random forest (RF) algorithm is used as the classification engine. The experiments show that our method can predict conformational B-cell epitopes with high accuracy. Evaluated by leave-one-out cross validation (LOOCV), our method achieves the mean AUC value of 0.633 for the benchmark bound dataset, and the mean AUC value of 0.654 for the benchmark unbound dataset. When compared with the state-of-the-art prediction models in the independent test, our method demonstrates comparable or better performance.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Our method is demonstrated to be effective for the prediction of conformational epitopes. Based on the study, we develop a tool to predict the conformational epitopes from 3D structures, available at <url>http://code.google.com/p/my-project-bpredictor/downloads/list</url>.</p

Prediction of Peptide Reactivity with Human IVIg through a Knowledge-Based Approach

The prediction of antibody-protein (antigen) interactions is very difficult due to the huge variability that characterizes the structure of the antibodies. The region of the antigen bound to the antibodies is called epitope. Experimental data indicate that many antibodies react with a panel of distinct epitopes (positive reaction). The Challenge 1 of DREAM5 aims at understanding whether there exists rules for predicting the reactivity of a peptide/epitope, i.e., its capability to bind to human antibodies. DREAM 5 provided a training set of peptides with experimentally identified high and low reactivities to human antibodies. On the basis of this training set, the participants to the challenge were asked to develop a predictive model of reactivity. A test set was then provided to evaluate the performance of the model implemented so far

Blueprint for a minimal photoautotrophic cell: conserved and variable genes in Synechococcus elongatus PCC 7942

Background: Simpler biological systems should be easier to understand and to engineer towards pre-defined goals. One way to achieve biological simplicity is through genome minimization. Here we looked for genomic islands in the fresh water cyanobacteria Synechococcus elongatus PCC 7942 (genome size 2.7 Mb) that could be used as targets for deletion. We also looked for conserved genes that might be essential for cell survival.Results: By using a combination of methods we identified 170 xenologs, 136 ORFans and 1401 core genes in the genome of S. elongatus PCC 7942. These represent 6.5%, 5.2% and 53.6% of the annotated genes respectively. We considered that genes in genomic islands could be found if they showed a combination of: a) unusual G+C content; b) unusual phylogenetic similarity; and/or c) a small number of the highly iterated palindrome 1 (HIP1) motif plus an unusual codon usage. The origin of the largest genomic island by horizontal gene transfer (HGT) could be corroborated by lack of coverage among metagenomic sequences from a fresh water microbialite. Evidence is also presented that xenologous genes tend to cluster in operons. Interestingly, most genes coding for proteins with a diguanylate cyclase domain are predicted to be xenologs, suggesting a role for horizontal gene transfer in the evolution of Synechococcus sensory systems.Conclusions: Our estimates of genomic islands in PCC 7942 are larger than those predicted by other published methods like SIGI-HMM. Our results set a guide to non-essential genes in S. elongatus PCC 7942 indicating a path towards the engineering of a model photoautotrophic bacterial cell.Financial support was provided by grants BFU2009-12895-C02-01/BMC (Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, Spain), the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement number 212894 and Prometeo/2009/092 (Conselleria d’Educació, Generalitat Valenciana, Spain) to A. Moya. Work in the FdlC laboratory was supported by grants BFU2008-00995/BMC (Spanish Ministry of Education), RD06/0008/1012 (RETICS research network, Instituto de Salud Carlos III, Spanish Ministry of Health) and LSHM-CT- 2005_019023 (European VI Framework Program). Dr. González-Domenech was supported by grant from the University of Granada. LD, thanks to financial support from Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

Cross-reactive neutralizing antibody epitopes against Enterovirus 71 identified by an in silico approach

Currently, infections of hand, foot and mouth disease HFMD) due to Human Enterovirus 71 (EV71) cannot be prevented or treated, as there are no suitable vaccines or antiviral drugs. This study aimed to identify potential vaccine candidates for EV71 using in silico analysis of its viral capsid proteins. A combined in silico approach utilizing computational hidden Markov model (HMM), propensity scale algorithm, and artificial learning, identified three 15-mer structurally conserved B-cell epitope candidates lying within the EV71 capsid proteins. Peptide vaccine candidates incorporating a target B-cell epitope and a promiscuous T-cell epitope from the related polio virus were synthesized using solid-phase Fmoc chemistry. Inbred BALB/C mice which were inoculated with two 10μg doses of the synthetic peptide, generated anti-peptide antibodies. Purified IgG isolated from pooled sera of the inoculated mice neutralized EV71 infections in vitro. Furthermore, these neutralizing antibodies were cross-reactive against other members of the Picornaviridae family, demonstrating greater than 50% virus neutralization. This indicates that the current approach is promising for the development of synthetic peptide-based vaccine candidates against Picornaviridae. Development of effective vaccines is of paramount importance in managing the disease in the Asia Pacific regions where this virus is endemic and has significant social, economic and public health ramifications

Structure and dynamics of the active Gs-coupled human secretin receptor

The class B secretin GPCR (SecR) has broad physiological effects, with target potential for treatment of metabolic and cardiovascular disease. Molecular understanding of SecR binding and activation is important for its therapeutic exploitation. We combined cryo-electron microscopy, molecular dynamics, and biochemical cross-linking to determine a 2.3 Å structure, and interrogate dynamics, of secretin bound to the SecR:Gs complex. SecR exhibited a unique organization of its extracellular domain (ECD) relative to its 7-transmembrane (TM) core, forming more extended interactions than other family members. Numerous polar interactions formed between secretin and the receptor extracellular loops (ECLs) and TM helices. Cysteine-cross-linking, cryo-electron microscopy multivariate analysis and molecular dynamics simulations revealed that interactions between peptide and receptor were dynamic, and suggested a model for initial peptide engagement where early interactions between the far N-terminus of the peptide and SecR ECL2 likely occur following initial binding of the peptide C-terminus to the ECD

The two photocycles of photoactive yellow protein from Rhodobacter sphaeroides

The absorption spectrum of the photoactive yellow protein from Rhodobacter sphaeroides (R-PYP) shows two maxima, absorbing at 360 nm (R-PYP(360)) and 446 nm (R-PYP(446)), respectively. Both forms are photoactive and part of a temperature- and pH-dependent equilibrium (Haker, A., Hendriks, J., Gensch, T., Hellingwerf, K. J., and Crielaard, W. (2000) FEBS Lett. 486, 52-56). At 20 degrees C, for PYP characteristic, the 446-nm absorbance band displays a photocycle, in which the depletion of the 446-nm ground state absorption occurs in at least three phases, with time constants of <30 ns, 0.5 micros, and 17 micros. Intermediates with both blue- and red-shifted absorption maxima are transiently formed, before a blue-shifted intermediate (pB(360), lambda(max) = 360 nm) is established. The photocycle is completed with a monophasic recovery of the ground state with a time constant of 2.5 ms. At 7 degrees C these photocycle transitions are slowed down 2- to 3-fold. Upon excitation of R-PYP(360) with a UV-flash (330 +/- 50 nm) a species with a difference absorption maximum at approximately 435 nm is observed that returns to R-PYP(360) on a minute time scale. Recovery can be accelerated by a blue light flash (450 nm). R-PYP(360) and R-PYP(446) differ in their overall protein conformation, as well as in the isomerization and protonation state of the chromophore, as determined with the fluorescent polarity probe Nile Red and Fourier Transform Infrared spectroscopy, respectively