Linear antibody epitope prediction using AlphaFold2.
- Open access
AlphaFold2-based PAbFold pipeline accurately predicts linear antibody epitopes from sequence data, successfully identifying epitopes for known and novel antibodies.
- Why it matters: Understanding antibody epitopes is crucial for molecular function insights and vaccine development, but existing methods are laborious and costly, limiting rapid analysis.
- What they did: The team developed PAbFold, a computational pipeline using localColabFold implementation of AlphaFold2 to model antibody-peptide complexes, tested on known targets and a novel anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibody with experimental validation.
- The result: PAbFold reliably identified linear epitopes from sequences alone, enabling quick, cost-effective epitope mapping, with potential applications in immunology and therapeutic antibody design.