Title

Discriminating antigen and non-antigen using proteome dissimilarity: bacterial antigens.

Authors

Kamna Ramakrishnan¹, Darren R Flower ^2,*

Affiliation

The Jenner Institute, University of Oxford, Compton, Newbury, Berkshire, United Kingdom, RG20 7NN; ¹Medical Genetics Section, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. EH4 2XU; ²Life and Health Sciences, Aston University, Aston Triangle, Birmingham, United Kingdom. B5 7ET.

Email

D.R.Flower@aston.ac.uk.

Article Type

Date

Received March 19, 2010; accepted April 14, 2010; published April 30, 2010

Abstract

It has been postulated that immunogenicity results from the overall dissimilarity of pathogenic proteins versus the host proteome. We have sought to use this concept to discriminate between antigens and non-antigens of bacterial origin. Sets of 100 known antigenic and nonantigenic peptide sequences from bacteria were compared to human and mouse proteomes. Both antigenic and non-antigenic sequences lacked human or mouse homologues. Observed distributions were compared using the non-parametric Mann-Whitney test. The statistical null hypothesis was accepted, indicating that antigen and non-antigens did not differ significantly. Likewise, we were unable to determine a threshold able to separate meaningfully antigen from non-antigen. Thus, antigens cannot be predicted from pathogen genomes based solely on their dissimilarity to the human genome.

Keywords

Citation

Ramakrishnan et al. Bioinformation 4(10): 000-000 (2010)

Edited by

P. Reche

ISSN

0973-2063

Publisher

Biomedical Informatics

License

This is an Open Access article which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. This is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License.