Antigenic: An improved prediction model of protective antigens

An antigen is a protein capable of triggering an effective immune system response. Protective antigens are the ones that can invoke specific and enhanced adaptive immune response to subsequent exposure to the specific pathogen or related organisms. Such proteins are therefore of immense importance in vaccine preparation and drug design. However, the laboratory experiments to isolate and identify antigens from a microbial pathogen are expensive, time consuming and often unsuccessful. This is why Reverse Vaccinology has become the modern trend of vaccine search, where computational methods are first applied to predict protective antigens or their determinants, known as epitopes. In this paper, we propose a novel, accurate computational model to identify protective antigens efficiently. Our model extracts features directly from…