Benchmarking B cell epitope prediction: underperformance of existing methods

Abstract

Sequence profiling is used routinely to predict the location of B-cell epitopes. In the postgenomic era, the need for reliable epitope prediction is clear. We assessed 484 amino acid propensity scales in combination with ranges of plotting parameters to examine exhaustively the correlation of peaks and epitope location within 50 proteins mapped for polyclonal responses. After examining more than 10(6) combinations, we found that even the best set of scales and parameters performed only marginally better than random. Our results confirm the null hypothesis: Single-scale amino acid propensity profiles cannot be used to predict epitope location reliably. The implication for studies using such methods is obvious.

Figure 1.

Specificity vs. sensitivity scores of the 150 optimized scales from the three amino acid sequence profiling methods. The broken line indicates random prediction.