Advances of bioinformatics tools applied in virus epitopes prediction.

In recent years, the in silico epitopes prediction tools have facilitated the progress of vaccines development significantly and many have been applied to predict epitopes in viruses successfully. Herein, a general overview of different tools currently available, including T cell and B cell epitopes prediction tools, is presented. And the principles of different prediction algorithms are reviewed briefly. Finally, several examples are present to illustrate the application of the prediction tools.