No detectable in-silico molecular mimicry between bacterial CdtB and human vinculin: a rigorous, null-controlled, multi-level immunoinformatics analysis
Preprint
A reproducible, null-controlled immunoinformatics pipeline (CVMP) tests the proposed molecular mimicry between bacterial CdtB and human vinculin, the mechanism behind commercialized anti-CdtB / anti-vinculin IBS biomarkers, at five independent levels. The pipeline recovers a known positive control (streptococcal M5 vs cardiac myosin) and rejects a negative control, but finds no statistically robust CdtB-vinculin mimicry at the sequence, structural, or B-cell-epitope level. The result constrains, but does not disprove, the clinical phenomenon and relocates the burden of proof to direct experiment.