The Similarities And Differences Between MHC Ⅱ 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 Ⅱ 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 Ⅱ. 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.