TY - JOUR A1 - Connor, Daniel Oliver A1 - Danckert, Lena A1 - Hoppe, Sebastian A1 - Bier, Frank Fabian A1 - von Nickisch-Rosenegk, Markus T1 - Epitope determination of immunogenic proteins of Neisseria gonorrhoeae JF - PLoS one N2 - Neisseria gonorrhoeae is the causative organism of gonorrhoea, a sexually transmitted disease that globally accounts for an estimated 80 to 100 million new infections per year. Increasing resistances to all common antibiotics used for N. gonorrhoeae treatment pose the risk of an untreatable disease. Further knowledge of ways of infection and host immune response are needed to understand the pathogen-host interaction and to discover new treatment alternatives against this disease. Therefore, detailed information about immunogenic proteins and their properties like epitope sites could advance further research in this area. In this work, we investigated immunogenic proteins of N. gonorrhoeae for linear epitopes by microarrays. Dominant linear epitopes were identified for eleven of the nineteen investigated proteins with three polyclonal rabbit antibodies from different immunisations. Identified linear epitopes were further examined for non-specific binding with antibodies to Escherichia coli and the closely related pathogen Neisseria meningitidis. On top of that, amino acids crucial for the antibody epitope binding were detected by microarray based alanine scans. Y1 - 2017 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0180962 SN - 1932-6203 VL - 12 PB - PLoS CY - San Fransisco ER -