"Wir haben (…) die [Phospho-]AKs ausgetestet, und sie funktionieren alle sehr gut. Sehr saubere einzelne Bande in Plaettchen." |
A customer's quote
The two figures vividly illustrate that selecting an epitope solely based on software algorithms is an essentially impossible task.
Three different prediction programs, taken as an example, suggest a variety of different regions that might be suitable as an antigenic peptide. In contrast, the epitope mapping experiment (anonymized data from a recent customer's project) reveals that a rabbit immunized with the full-length protein choses another set of epitopes, that does not match any of the software suggested candidates.
Shown are the results from a representative partial sequence.
Epitope selection requires more than just applying a prediction algorithm to the protein sequence.
Therefore, our proprietary work-flow comprises a wide variety of different aspects and methods, including (where available) 3D models and other background information, such as species comparison, secondary structure, domain structure, ...
These considerations lead to a pre-selection of different epitope sequences, which we will discuss in detail with our customers to derive a common educated decision.