Predição In Silico de Epítopos de Microrganismos com Identidade a Autoantígenos Humanos / In Silico Prediction of Microorganism Motifs with Identity to Human Autoantigens
AUTOR(ES)
André Luis da Silva Breve
DATA DE PUBLICAÇÃO
2010
RESUMO
The origin of autoimmune diseases is multifactorial. It involves environmental conditions and genetic predisposition that difficulties its identification. Several researchers have studied the association between infectious agents and autoimmunity, which can be initiated by a process named molecular mimicry. In this case, cross immune responses involving self antigens have been documented. This project aims to search in silico for associations between microorganisms epitopes and human autoantigens. The first step was the identification of similarities in amino acid sequences between microorganisms epitopes and human autoantigens by use of sequence local alignment performed by the program blastp. The sequences of the microorganisms epitope and the human autoantigens had been previously acquired in the Immune Epitope Database and Analysis Resource (IEDB) and Genbank, respectively. The modeling of protein structures for the antigen and autoantigen was also carried out to show the best alignment values, based on the E-value, using the programs Modeller and Rosetta. Finally, the prediction of epitopes was performed by use of NetMHC and NetMHCII softwares to evaluate the possibility of microorganisms epitopes and human autoantigens join the same HLA alleles. Similarities of protein sequences was found for both. It was possible to observe affinity of 4 HLA alleles between an epitope from LSA-1 Plasmodium falciparum antigen and the myosin, suggesting an association between them, reaching the goal of this work.
ASSUNTO(S)
antígenos autoimmune diseases bioinformática bioinformatics doenças autoimunes epitopes epítopos mimetismo molecular molecular mimicry
