Reply: Does Clostridium botulinum neurotoxin A exhibit molecular mimicry with thyroid autoantigens and cause thyroid complications in predisposed persons?

Homology between TSH-R Tg TPO and Hashimoto rsquo s encephalopathy autoantigens

“…Search for homology was made using the standard parameters of the software, and only results with E<10 were considered. As also done previously (12)(13)(14)(15)(16)(17), we also ascertained whether the regions of homology found were immunologically relevant because containing T-and B-cell epitopes. Position of the epitopes for TSH-R, Tg and TPO along the primary structure of the corresponding proteins was reported elsewhere (12)(13)(14)(15)(16)(17)(19)(20)(21).…”

“…As also done previously (12)(13)(14)(15)(16)(17), we also ascertained whether the regions of homology found were immunologically relevant because containing T-and B-cell epitopes. Position of the epitopes for TSH-R, Tg and TPO along the primary structure of the corresponding proteins was reported elsewhere (12)(13)(14)(15)(16)(17)(19)(20)(21). Position of the epitopes for alpha-enolase was derived from the literature (10,22), whereas there are no data available for AKRIAI and DDAHI.…”

“…We followed our usual procedure, as consolidated in previous bioinformatics papers (12)(13)(14)(15)(16)(17). Thus, in the present paper, we first retrieved the amino acid sequence of the six proteins under study (TSH-R (accession number © 1996-2020 P16473), Tg (accession number NP_003226), TPO (accession number AAA61217), alphaenolase (accession number P06733), AKRIAI (accession number AAF01260) and DDAHI (accession number O94760)) from the Entrez Protein database (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/protein), and then probed for amino acid sequence homology each of the three thyroid autoantigens with each of alphaenolase, AKRIAI and DDAHI in a pairwise sequence alignment.…”