Figure 1. Disease specific antibody epitope discovery using Display-Seq and the IMUNE algorithm.
Display-Seq and IMUNE combine experimental screening and next-generation sequencing (NGS) with computational analysis to identify putative disease biomarker motifs. Bacterial display peptide library members that bind antibodies in individual samples are separated using magnetic and/or fluorescence based sorting. NGS is used to identify the peptide sequences composing the binder populations. Patterns of amino acids that are highly statistically significant (e.g. p < 0.0001) within the peptides from many disease patients but are not statistically significant (e.g. p > 0.05) in control samples are then identified using computational analysis (IMUNE). Finally, similar patterns are clustered together into the putative disease specific biomarker motifs.