<p>This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.</p> <p>Many vaccines have been developed from live attenuated forms of bacterial pathogens or from killed bacterial cells. However, an increased awareness of the potential
for transient side-effects following vaccination has prompted an increased emphasis
on the use of sub-unit vaccines, rather than those based on whole bacterial cells.
The identification of vaccine sub-units is often a lengthy process and bioinformatics
approaches have recently been used to identify candidate protein vaccine antigens.
Such methods ultimately offer the promise of a more rapid advance towards preclinical
studies with vaccines. We have compared the properties of known bacterial
vaccine antigens against randomly selected proteins and identified differences in the
make-up of these two groups. A computer algorithm that exploits these differences
allows the identification of potential vaccine antigen candidates from pathogenic
bacteria on the basis of their amino acid composition, a property inherently associated
with sub-cellular location.</p>
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Comp Funct Genomics. 2003 Oct; 4(5):468-478