Toxicity, Human Similarity, and Experimental Records

The linear epitopes and the segment sequences of conformational epitopes were checked for potential toxicity using ToxinPred server (Gupta et al. 2013). The epitopes sequences were entered as FASTA format, the support-vector machine² (SVM) algorithm was selected and other parameters were left as the server defaults.

By searching in BLASTP (https://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast.cgi?PAGE=Proteins), selected linear and conformational epitopes were screened for similarity with human proteome (taxid 9606). The epitopes with ≥ 90% similarity with human peptides (at both coverage and identity values) were excluded from the study.

The shortlisted epitopes were investigated for possible experimental records using the home page of IEDB (https://www.iedb.org/) by selecting human as the host and applying each epitope as query.