Conceptually, epitope-based vaccine design poses two distinct problems: (i) selecting the best epitopes to elicit the strongest possible immune response and (ii) arranging and linking them through short spacer sequences to string-of-beads vaccines, so that their recovery likelihood during antigen processing is maximized. Current state-of-the-art approaches solve this design problem sequentially. Consequently, such approaches are unable to capture the inter-dependencies between the two design steps, usually emphasizing theoretical immunogenicity over correct vaccine processing, thus resulting in vaccines with less effective immunogenicity in vivo.

中文翻译：

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串珠疫苗的联合表位选择和间隔区设计

从概念上讲，基于表位的疫苗设计存在两个不同的问题：（i）选择最佳表位以引发最强的免疫反应；（ii）通过短间隔序列将它们排列并连接到串珠状疫苗上，以便其恢复抗原处理过程中的可能性最大。当前最先进的方法可以顺序解决此设计问题。因此，这样的方法不能捕获两个设计步骤之间的相互依赖性，通常强调理论免疫原性超过正确的疫苗加工，从而导致疫苗在体内具有较低的有效免疫原性。