Table 3.

New Technologies for Vaccine Research.

Technology or Tool	Description
Next Generation Sequencing	Massively parallel sequencing platforms that generate millions of bases of sequence reads in a relatively short timeframe. These platforms have a wide variety of applications including, but not limited to: whole genome sequencing, transcriptome profiling, or identification of genome-wide patterns of miRNA patterns or DNA methylation.
Proteomics	Mass spectrometry techniques for the unbiased, semi-quantitative characterization of the entire protein content of a sample.
CyTOF	Mass cytometry. Single cell analysis platform combining mass spectrometry with flow cytometry. Antibodies are tagged with heavy metal ions and used to stain cell populations of interest. Spectral overlap limits flow cytometry to ~20 markers. CyTOF has increased signal resolution and potentially offers 10X as many parameters.
Vaccinomics / Systems Biology	An approach to understanding variations in immune response to vaccines that utilizes high-dimensional technologies to fully characterize, at an omics level, the perturbations elicited by vaccination. This rich dataset is then analyzed using bioinformatic tools and computational modeling to create a predictive model of immune responses that can be tested and improved through iterative experimental cycles.
Single Cell Sequencing	A set of methods for capturing the transcriptome of individual cells. Methods include: STRT, SMART-Seq, Quartz-Seq, and CEL-Seq
Epitope Prediction Algorithms	A set of computational tools that use binding motif databases, artificial neural networks, hidden Markov models, support vector machines or other methods to predict MHC-binding peptides in protein sequences. Examples include: SYFPEITHI, BIMAS, PREDEP, RANKPEP