Phage display technique is an established combinatorial technology to characterize conformational epitopes of proteins. It identifies the peptide epitopes (also known as mimotopes) by binding to monoclonal antibodies similar to the natural epitopes. In general the antibody recognizes a discontinuous fragment (conformational) of amino acid residues on the surface of an antigen. Therefore to locate the interaction site mimicked by the epitope on the antigen surface using just sequence alignment is not possible. A new and fully automated method "EpiSearch" has been developed to analyze and predict the conformational epitopes on the surface of an antigen. The algorithm uses input peptide sequences obtained from the phage display experiment and maps it on the monomer surface of an interacting antigen structure.

URL

http://curie.utmb.edu/episearch.html