Comprehensive Analysis and Annotation of Available Fungal Allergens for the Presence of T-cell and B-cell epitopes and Development of the SVM Based Classifiers for in silico Prediction of Novel Allergen Sequences

Background: The reign of allergic infections caused by pathogenic fungi during the past few decades has created a major concern among healthcare professionals. Fungal allergens cause allergic manifestations in atopic and healthy individuals as well. The presence of T-cell and B-cell epitopes is essential for a protein to be an allergen and sharing of these epitopes make the allergens cross reactive that is a major issue which should be considered while selecting fungus specific allergens for clinical and diagnostic applications. Methods: The present study is a gathered effort to provide the comprehensive analysis of the availa-ble fungal allergens for presence of T-cell and B-cell epitopes along with the hint of cross reactivity among allergens of different fungi. The annotation for about 1927 unique allergen sequences, related to 194 different fungal genus is compiled and made available freely to be used by researchers worldwide through internet from the url: http://facrd.mdurtk.in/. Besides this we have also put a step forward to de-velop SVM based classifiers trained on reported fungal allergens and capable of making in silico predic-tions of novel allergens. Result: The classifiers are provided in the download section of the web pages for the interested users. Conclusion: The main purpose of this study is to help with the better management of fungal aller-gies by predicting novel allergens as well as cross reactivity among them.