Contemporary vaccine design necessitates discrimination between the immunogenic and non-immunogenic components within a pathogen. To successfully target a humoral immune response, the vaccine antigen should contain not only B-cell epitopes but abounding Th-cell agretopes and MHC-II binding regions as well. No single computational method is available that allows the identification of such regions on antigens with good reliability. A consensus approach based on several prediction methods can be adopted to overcome this problem.Targeting the outer membrane protein (Omp) H as a candidate, a comprehensive work flow is described for the computational identification of immunodominant epitopes toward the designing of a peptide vaccine against Pasteurella multocida.
Keywords: B-cell epitope prediction; Immunoinformatics; Outer membrane protein H; Pasteurella multocida; Peptide vaccine; Th-cell agretope prediction.