ADEPT - A COMPUTER-PROGRAM FOR PREDICTION OF PROTEIN ANTIGENIC DETERMINANTS

ADEPT, a program that can be used for prediction of protein antigenic determinants from the amino acid sequence alone for the cases of humor al and cellular immune response, is described. Most methods presently utilized for this purpose are implemented in the program along with so me original parameters for the case of humoral immune response. There is also a possibility to combine several methods for the case of humor al immune response, which provides a means to create new predictive me thods. ADEPT also includes a literature-derived database of proteins i n the SWISS-PROT standard with experimentally determined antigenic det erminants, so the predictive ability of new methods can be assessed wi thin the program and corresponding statistical information is calculat ed ADEPT may be useful for solving various tasks involving the delinea tion of antigenic regions on proteins or characterization of peptide f ragments, arising, for example, in protein engineering (e. g. selectio n of protein portions most suitable for insertion of peptide sequences that are antigenically active or possessing other desired characteris tics), and in particular for construction of vaccines containing B- an d/or T-cell epitopes, as well as for other problems of medico-biologic al research.