Immnoinformatics: novel view in understanding of immune system function, databases and prediction of immunogenic epitopes

Immunoinformatics or computational immunology has recently emerged as an important role player in the field of analytic sciences, remodelling and prediction of immune function, novel vaccine designing, allergenicitic analysis and drug discovery. Immunoinformatics has an important role in improving the immunological studies and its rapid development after human Genome sequencing project, as well as other organisms, has led to a great opportunity of access to huge immunological relevant information. This field of science acts as a connection between laboratory experiments and computational sciences. These achievements extensively have vital strategic value from the perspective of global health and besides, it is less time and cost consuming. This article, reviews different general and specific immunological databases, predicts approaches to both B and T cell epitopes and principle of vaccine bioinformatics and finally describes applications of Immnoinformatics. In fact the main aim of this review was to introduce this technique to Iranian researchers who are less familiar with this immunological analytic tool, hoping this would provide them with new and up to date approach toward their immunological studies.