Researchers from the Bioinformatics group at Russia’s AIRI Institute for Artificial Intelligence have created a program that recognizes the binding sites of antibodies to viruses and bacterial proteins.
The creators named the program SEMA (Spatial Epitope Modeling with Artificial Intelligence).
The epitope or antigenic determinant found on the surface of the virus is called the antibody attracting site and serves as a “landing site” for antibodies.
According to the researchers, the proteins to be analyzed are loaded into the program as an amino acid chain or a three-dimensional structure. The SEMA program determines which amino acid residues make up the epitopes and how well they interact with the antibodies. This information can be used to select the most promising protein fragments to add to the vaccine and to search for new therapeutic antibodies.
“Today, many different tools have been developed to study proteins in the context of their interaction with antibodies,” Tatiana Shashkova, senior researcher at the AIRI Institute, told the newspaper “Izvestia.” “Because the current version of SEMA is its beginning, to provide a suitable basis for the study of proteins using modern artificial intelligence models.”
And he added that getting the results of working with this tool is complicated and takes a long time.
The scientists believe that this tool, developed in close collaboration with the “Gamalia Center” scientists, will be useful to biotechnology institutes and companies working in the field of creating vaccines and drugs to treat those viral and bacterial diseases.
Source: “Izvestia” newspaper.
Source: Arabic RT
