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BioPeople Course in Immunological Bioinformatics - A Hands On Practical Course for Industry

The course will be held on November 30, 9.00 - 17.00, 2011 at The Technical University of Denmark, Bygning 116 Auditorium 81.

Course programme

Practical information

The workshop will focus on the use of bioinformatics prediction methods to solve problems related to immunology.

Participation in the workshop is free for all employees in BioPeople member organisations and registration is done online on the BioPeople page.

Objective

The goal/objective is to give an introduction to the use of bioinformatics in immunology. The tutorial will give an overview of the field of immunoinformatics with a focus on rational epitope discovery. The tutorial will demonstrate how state-of-the-art bioinformatics tools might provide insights to the nature of host pathogen interactions that potentially might impact the way novel vaccines against emerging and existing pathogens will be derived.

Background

The immune system reacts to infections in a highly specialized manner. T cells play a central role in the cell-mediated immunity. T cells scrutinize small peptide fragments (epitopes) presented in complex with major histocompatibility complexes (MHCs) on the surface of most cells in the host. Cytotoxic T cells kill cells that present peptides of foreign (infections) or abnormal (cancer) origin. T helper cells, on the other hand, orchestrate the immune response by simulating other immune cells. Identifying which peptides will be presented in complex with a given MHC molecule hence is of pivotal importance for the understanding cellular immune responses. Several groups have developed in silico methods for T cell epitope identification. The overall accuracy of these methods has improved significantly over the recent decade due to the large increase of peptide:MHC binding data available in the public databases and the development of novel bioinformatics frameworks for data-driven method development. Both the immune response in a given host and the pathogen infection are highly diverse. The MHC molecules define the specificity of the immune system. In humans more than three thousand MHC allelic variants have been discovered so far. Each MHC molecule potentially has a unique binding specificity and presents a distinct set of antigenic peptides to the immune system. Two hosts will hence not react in a similar manner to an infection. Likewise many viruses have a high mutation rate, making a viral infection of today different from an infection tomorrow, and two pathogen infections will not be identical. Both of these aspects of diversity place great challenges for our understanding of host pathogen interactions and cellular immune responses. The tutorial will give an overview of the recent advances in bioinformatics prediction tools for rational epitope discovery and demonstrated how state-of-the-art in silico algorithms can be use in a highly cost-effective manner to aid our understanding of host pathogen interactions and guide the process of rational epitope discovery.

Target audience

The tutorial will be most interesting for people working in general biomedicine and immune system related research. The tutorial will thus not have a strong bioinformatics focus, but will try in simple terms to describe how conventional bioinformatics algorithms with great success can been applied to characterize central parts of the adaptive immune system, and illustrate how immunoinformatics prediction tools can be used as guides for rational epitope discovery.