BioMed Central, Genome Medicine, 1(8), 2016
DOI: 10.1186/s13073-016-0263-6
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Abstract String-of-beads polypeptides allow convenient delivery of epitope-based vaccines. The success of a polypeptide relies on efficient processing: constituent epitopes need to be recovered while avoiding neo-epitopes from epitope junctions. Spacers between epitopes are employed to ensure this, but spacer selection is non-trivial. We present a framework to determine optimally the length and sequence of a spacer through multi-objective optimization for human leukocyte antigen class I restricted polypeptides. The method yields string-of-bead vaccines with flexible spacer lengths that increase the predicted epitope recovery rate fivefold while reducing the immunogenicity from neo-epitopes by 44Â % compared to designs without spacers.