Computational immunology: The coming of age

Abstract

SummaryThe explosive growth in biotechnology combined with major advances in information technology has the potential to radically transform immunology in the postgenomics era. Not only do we now have ready access to vast quantities of existing data, but new data with relevance to immunology are being accumulated at an exponential rate. Resources for computational immunology include biological databases and methods for data extraction, comparison, analysis and interpretation. Publicly accessible biological databases of relevance to immunologists number in the hundreds and are growing daily. The ability to efficiently extract and analyse information from these databases is vital for efficient immunology research. Most importantly, a new generation of computational immunology tools enables modelling of peptide transport by the transporter associated with antigen processing (TAP), modelling of antibody binding sites, identification of allergenic motifs and modelling of T-cell receptor serial triggering.

Negative selection on neutralization epitopes of poliovirus surface proteins: implications for prediction of candidate epitopes for immunization

“…These epitopes should eventually be determined experimentally, but it would be helpful if we could predict candidate epitopes computationally because it accelerates the entire process, which is particularly important when vaccines are developed against emerging viruses. Computational methods have been established for predicting epitope regions in the amino acid sequence of a given protein (Petrovsky and Brusic, 2002). It is however necessary to choose appropriate epitopes for immunization among them.…”

iVAX: An integrated toolkit for the selection and optimization of antigens and the design of epitope-driven vaccines

“…The process was at first called "vaccinomics" by Brusic and Petrovsky in 2002. 5 Alternative terms include "reverse vaccinology," a term coined by Rappuoli in 2003 6 and "immunome-derived or genome-derived vaccine design" by Pederson; 7 De Groot and Martin; 4 and Doytchinova, Taylor, and Flower (Fig. 2).…”

A Monte Carlo Simulation for the Construction of Cytotoxic T Lymphocytes Repertoire

“…Immunoinformatics is a new discipline emerging from the growing knowledge gathered for decades in experimental immunology and immunogenomics (Korber et al, 2006;Petrovsky & Brusic, 2002). Being both an experimental and theoretical field, it is foreseen that immunomics will play an important role for the future of immunology (Petrovsky & Brusic, 2006).…”