Presents the Friday Keck Center Teleconference*
Algorithms and Software Tools for the Prediction of Allergenicity
Werner Braun, Ph.D.,
Professor, Dept. of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
4:00 pm Friday
Mar. 14th , 2008
5.521 Levin Hall
(Refreshments at 3:45)
Abstract: Allergies and asthma are a growing health problem worldwide. In many countries regulatory agencies have adopted safety guidelines, based on WHO/FAO and EFSA recommendations, to prevent that potentially allergenic novel food or agricultural products reach consumers. Bioinformatics software tools play an important role in these guidelines. We created the Structural Database of Allergenic Proteins (SDAP, http://fermi.utmb.edu/SDAP/) to archive data on known allergens and implemented novel bioinformatics rules for the prediction of allergenicity. Using the sequence information of known allergens in SDAP, we used a large-scale statistical analysis to test current bioinformatics guidelines. We found that these bioinformatics guidelines are far from optimal. In this presentation I will describe some of the new algorithmic approaches developed in our laboratory to predict the potential allergenicity of proteins from the amino acid sequence and 3D structure. We developed a novel property distance (PD value) to compare the physical-chemical properties of discrete areas of allergenic proteins to known IgE epitopes. We previously showed that by screening segments of allergens with low PD values we could detect related segments in allergens that had experimentally been shown to bind IgE. These studies have now been expanded, to show that IgE binding correlates with PD values in designed peptide sequences. The Pfam classification of allergens in SDAP also enabled us to generate novel sequence motifs characteristic of allergenicity. We also include examples of how 3D structures of allergens can be used as a basis for quantitative rules to predict allergenicity. (http://scsb.utmb.edu/faculty/braun.htm )
