First, the peptide sequences were submitted to BLAST to identify
templates that could be used to construct the three-dimensional
structures of the peptides through a comparative modeling
approach (de Andrade et al., 2012; Pinheiro et al., 2012 and Santos
Junior et al., 2011). The sequence similarity of each peptide with
the corresponding region on the database protein was greater than
40%. Table 1 shows the templates used to build each of the epitopes.
As can be observed, the root-mean-square deviation (RMSD)
values ranged from 0.25 Å to 0.06 Å for the Ca-atom. The resultant
three-dimensional peptide structures were then refined using energy
minimization and molecular dynamics methods. The energy
minimization method avoids unfavorable atomic interactions and
packing forces. Furthermore, the conformational behavior and
the potential energy surface were evaluated carefully. The analysis
of the torsion angles in the model, which was refined after the MD
simulation, showed that this simulation did not cause serious distortions
in the structures.