What Is Epitope Mapping?

Question

[Jason]

Hi all(:

I am currently working on a project on H1N1. I am working on the epitope mapping areas.

Kinda new to epitope mapping so would like to know some ideas and concept on forming a epitope map?

Thanks alot and have a nice day:D

Answer 1

[hadasa]

As pointed out earlier you might want to add more details to your question. Otherwise to map your epitopes you can use an laboratory approach or an informatic approach.

With lab approach, get your proteins(antigens) and get some appropritae serum, perform an agglutination test and you will tell whether you have reactivity or not. Ideally if the antigen has been exposed to its homologous serum, it should react but you would want a case of heterologous cross reactivity. That means one antigen can agglutinate all panels of serum. This process is labour intesive and not as direct as i make it sound.

Secondly you can map the epitopes in silico using one of the many tools that are now available. At this point you want to know what type of immune response would be generated by your proteins)antigens of interest? is it T-cell mediated? class I or Class II? Is it antibody mediated? Knowing this will largely help you to choose an approriate tool.

thirdly comes the task of validating your epitopes. Are thy real? are the epitopes antigenic? immunogenic? are they protective? what memory responses do they induce? You can use a protein array to validate the epitopes. There could be other ways i guess.

Have a look at these publications and the tools available on this site http://tools.immuneepitope.org/main/html/references.html

Answer 2

[Khader Shameer]

It is not clear from your question whether you are looking at available tools / database for epitope mapping or whether you have sequence / structure data or if you are looking at a particular protein from H1N1 to begin your analysis. If you are new to epitope mapping you could start from here. Various tools/servers are available for generic epitope mapping. Bioinformatics Link Directory will be a good start to familiarize with the available tools.