Structure of allergens and structure based epitope predictions

The structure determination of major allergens is a prerequisite for analyzing surface exposed areas of the allergen and for mapping conformational epitopes. These may be determined by experimental methods including crystallographic and NMR-based approaches or predicted by computational methods. In this review we summarize the existing structural information on allergens and their classification in protein fold families. The currently available allergen-antibody complexes are described and the experimentally obtained epitopes compared. Furthermore we discuss established methods for linear and conformational epitope mapping, putting special emphasis on a recently developed approach, which uses the structural similarity of proteins in combination with the experimental cross-reactivity data for epitope prediction.