Allergenicity and Toxicity Platform by Bioinformatics Institute (BII)

In silico safety assessment using AllerCatPro 2.0

By providing us protein/nucleotide sequences of interest, we provide detailed results of protein allergenicity potential using AllerCatPro 2.0. Our service can be used as a first step for protein safety assessment to find potential allergens for further evaluation.

Key Techniques

• AllerCatPro 2.0 predicts protein allergenicity potential based on the most comprehensive databases of reliable proteins associated with allergenicity from the WHO/IUIS, COMPARE, FARRP, UniProtKB and Allergome.
  

• AllerCatPro 2.0 combines the similarity of both amino acid sequences and 3D structures for the prediction while other computational methods use only sequence features. The results on our benchmark datasets indicated that 3D structure similarity contributes significantly to the performance of AllerCatPro 2.0.

• We provide an excel file containing AllerCatPro 2.0 result and a summary result table. The result includes potential cross-reactivity based on similarity in sequences and protein 3D structure to known allergens, protein information (Uniprot/NCBI), functionality (Pfam, InterPro, SUPFAM), as well as clinical relevance with regards to IgE prevalence and allergen information related to the most similar allergen.

• We also have a consultancy package if customers need more guidance and/or interpretation on results from AllerCatPro 2.0.

Applications

• Any sequence in FASTA format from databases, e.g., UniProt or RefSeq, can be used as input.

• Amino acid/peptide sequence data retrieved from mass spectrometry analysis from alternative proteins or novel food sources can be used as input to predict putative allergens.

• Input can be the whole transcriptome or proteome of organisms you are interested in to predict their allergenicity potential.

Note: artificially designed or engineered proteins as well as industrial enzymes, etc. are currently outside of the applicability domain of AllerCatPro.

For more information or interest in collaboration, please contact us at allercatpro@bii.a-star.edu.sg