Peptides were produced by Fmoc solid phase synthesis (Alta Bioscience, University of Birmingham, UK). The length of the peptides was limited by the EpiScan synthesis procedure (Alta Bioscience, University of Birmingham, UK) to a maximum of 30 amino acids. Thus the length of the peptides used for spotting onto microarrays ranged between 24 and 30 amino acids with an additional aminohexanoid acid (AHX) spacer and a biotin at the N-terminus. Biotin was required to bind peptides to a streptavidincoated solid phase, i.e. microscope glass slide for microarrays (Alta Bioscience, University of Birmingham, UK) or to 96 well plates for ELISA. In order to remove electric charges from the free Cterminus, the synthetic peptides were modified by carboxyterminal amidation. Thus, both N-terminal and C-terminal peptide ends were uncharged, mimicking natural segments of internal protein sequences.