SeRenDIP-CE: sequence-based interface prediction for conformational epitopes

Qingzhen Hou, Bas Stringer, Katharina Waury, Henriette Capel, Reza Haydarlou, Fuzhong Xue, Sanne Abeln, Jaap Heringa, K Anton Feenstra

Research output: Contribution to JournalArticleAcademicpeer-review

Abstract

MOTIVATION: Antibodies play an important role in clinical research and biotechnology, with their specificity determined by the interaction with the antigen's epitope region, as a special type of protein-protein interaction (PPI) interface. The ubiquitous availability of sequence data, allows us to predict epitopes from sequence in order to focus time-consuming wet-lab experiments towards the most promising epitope regions. Here, we extend our previously developed sequence-based predictors for homodimer and heterodimer PPI interfaces to predict epitope residues that have the potential to bind an antibody.

RESULTS: We collected and curated a high quality epitope dataset from the SAbDab database. Our generic PPI heterodimer predictor obtained an AUC-ROC of 0.666 when evaluated on the epitope test set. We then trained a random forest model specifically on the epitope dataset, reaching AUC 0.694. Further training on the combined heterodimer and epitope datasets, improves our final predictor to AUC 0.703 on the epitope test set. This is better than the best state-of-the-art sequence-based epitope predictor BepiPred-2.0. On one solved antibody-antigen structure of the COVID19 virus spike RNA binding domain, our predictor reaches AUC 0.778. We added the SeRenDIP-CE Conformational Epitope predictors to our webserver, which is simple to use and only requires a single antigen sequence as input, which will help make the method immediately applicable in a wide range of biomedical and biomolecular research.

AVAILABILITY: Webserver, source code and datasets at www.ibi.vu.nl/programs/serendipwww/.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)3421-3427
Number of pages7
JournalBioinformatics (Oxford, England)
Volume37
Issue number20
Early online date11 May 2021
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 15 Oct 2021

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
K.W. and S.A. received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie [860197] MIRIADE project. Q.H. was supported by the Young Scholars Program of Shandong University (21320082064101). F.X. was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (81773547) and the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2020YFC2003500).

Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 The Author(s).

Cite this