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Updated: Jun 23, 2026

Peptide Scanning-assisted Identification of a Monoclonal Antibody-recognized Linear B-cell Epitope
08:09

Peptide Scanning-assisted Identification of a Monoclonal Antibody-recognized Linear B-cell Epitope

Published on: March 24, 2017

What is a B-cell epitope?

Marc H V Van Regenmortel1

  • 1Ecole Supérieure de Biotechnologie de Strasbourg, Illkirch Cedex, France.

Methods in Molecular Biology (Clifton, N.J.)
|April 21, 2009
PubMed

The antigenicity of proteins resides in different types of antigenic determinants known as continuous and discontinuous epitopes, cryptotopes, neotopes, and mimotopes. All epitopes have fuzzy boundaries and can be identified only by their ability to bind to certain antibodies. Antigenic cross-reactivity is a common phenomenon because antibodies are always able to recognize a considerable number of related epitopes. This places severe limits to the specificity of antibodies. Antigenicity, which is the ability of an epitope to react with an antibody, must be distinguished from its immunogenicity or ability to induce antibodies in a competent vertebrate host. Failure to make this distinction partly explains why no successful peptide-based vaccines have yet been developed. Methods for predicting the epitopes of proteins are discussed and the reasons for the low success rate of epitope prediction are analyzed.

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