Title

Discriminating antigen and non-antigen using proteome dissimilarity II: viral and fungal antigens

Authors

Kamna Ramakrishnan¹, Darren R. Flower^2,*

Affiliation

¹The Jenner Institute, University of Oxford, Compton, Newbury, Berkshire, United Kingdom; RG20 7NN Medical Genetics Section, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom EH4 2XU;²2Aston University, Life and Health Sciences, Aston University, Aston Triangle, Birmingham, United Kingdom, B5 7ET

Email

D.R.Flower@aston.ac.uk;* Corresponding author

Article Type

Hypothesis

Date

received April 27, 2010; accepted May 27, 2010, published June 24, 2010

Abstract

Immunogenicity arises via many synergistic mechanisms, yet the overall dissimilarity of pathogenic proteins versus the host proteome has been proposed as a key arbiter. We have previously explored this concept in relation to Bacterial antigens; here we extend our analysis to antigens of viral and fungal origin. Sets of known viral and fungal antigenic and non-antigenic protein sequences 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 could not determine a threshold able meaningfully to separate non-antigen from antigen. We conclude that viral and fungal antigens cannot be predicted from pathogen genomes based solely on their dissimilarity to mammalian genomes.

Keywords

antigen, non-antigen, proteome dissimilarity, viral, fungal

Citation

Ramakrishnan, et al., Bioinformation 5(1):35-38 (2010)

Edited by

P. Kangueane

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.