Evaluation and Comparison of the Ability of Online Available Prediction Programs to Predict True Linear B-cell Epitopes

This work deals with the use of predictors to identify useful B-cell linear epitopes to develop immunoassays. Experimental techniques to meet this goal are quite expensive and time consuming. Therefore, we tested 5 free, online prediction methods (AAPPred, ABCpred, BcePred, BepiPred and Antigenic) w...

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Bibliographic Details
Authors: Costa, Juan Gabriel, Faccendini, Pablo Luis, Sferco, Silvano Juan, Lagier, Claudia Marina, Marcipar, Ivan Sergio
Format: article
Status:Published version
Publication Date:2013
Country:Argentina
Institution:Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas
Repository:CONICET Digital (CONICET)
Language:English
OAI Identifier:oai:ri.conicet.gov.ar:11336/6058
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/11336/6058
Access Level:Open access
Keyword:Diagnostic
Epitope
Prediction
Inmunochemistry
https://purl.org/becyt/ford/1.4
https://purl.org/becyt/ford/1
Description
Summary:This work deals with the use of predictors to identify useful B-cell linear epitopes to develop immunoassays. Experimental techniques to meet this goal are quite expensive and time consuming. Therefore, we tested 5 free, online prediction methods (AAPPred, ABCpred, BcePred, BepiPred and Antigenic) widely used for predicting linear epitopes, using the primary structure of the protein as the only input. We chose a set of 65 experimentally well documented epitopes obtained by the most reliable experimental techniques as our true positive set. To compare the quality of the predictor methods we used their positive predictive value (PPV), i.e. the proportion of the predicted epitopes that are true, experimentally confirmed epitopes, in relation to all the epitopes predicted. We conclude that AAPPred and ABCpred yield the best results, as compared with the other programs and with a random prediction procedure. Our results also indicate that considering the consensual epitopes predicted by several programs does not improve the PPV.