The Similarities And Differences Between MHC â…¡ Linear Epitope And Conformational Epitope

Immune system is considered as the protective mechanism for human beings. In adaptive immune system, T lymphocytes and B lymphocytes play the key role for recognizing and defending the foreign antigens. How to determine the epitopes for B-cells and T-cells fast and accurate is more and more important. At present, for T-cell epitope prediction, the higher accuracy has been achieved. However, little immunogenicity has been observed for part of the predicted epitopes which can be recognized by MHC â…¡ with higher binding affinity. On the other side, more improvement is necessary for the accuracy of B-cell epitope prediction. In the humoral immune process, the helper T-cell can recognize the peptides which have been presented by MHC â…¡. With the binding between the helper T-cell and peptides, the helper T-cell was activated and proliferated. The activated helper T-cell releases its own cytokine (IL-2), which can stimulate and start the proliferation of B-cells. With the consideration of the whole biological process, two signals are necessary to stimulate the B-cells to secrete the specific antibody for some antigens. One is the recognition between antigens and B-cell receptor (BCR). Then, the IL-2which was released by helper T-cells. Therefore, it is necessary to analyze the relationship between the recognition of antigen and T-cell and the recognition of antigen and B-cells, especially whether there have signal transferred between T-cell and B-cell. By analyzing the similarities and differences between two kinds of epitopes, we may provide new ideas for the methods of epitope prediction.