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 humoral and cellular immune response, is described. Most methods presently utilized for this purpose are implemented in the program along with some original parameters for the case of humoral immune response. There is also a possibility to combine several methods for the case of humoral immune response, which provides a means to create new predictive methods. ADEPT also includes a literature-derived database of proteins in the SWISS-PROT standard with experimentally determined antigenic determinants, so the predictive ability of new methods can be assessed within the program and corresponding statistical information is calculated. ADEPT may be useful for solving various tasks involving the delineation of antigenic regions on proteins or characterization of peptide fragments, arising, for example, in protein engineering (e.g. selection of protein portions most suitable for insertion of peptide sequences that are antigenically active or possessing other desired characteristics), and in particular for construction of vaccines containing B- and/or T-cell epitopes, as well as for other problems of medico-biological research.