As described above, MIMOX wraps ClustalW to align a set of mimotope sequences and then allows the alignment to be viewed, edited, and analyzed through an embedded version of JalView. Based on the review by Smith et al [3] , we also implemented a simple statistical method in the script mimocs.pl to derive a consensus sequence from the alignment. Firstly, the script counts the appearance of each kind of amino acid at each position in the alignment and calculates the percentage frequency of each one. The frequency of a given amino acid X at the position i of the alignment (f xi ) is defined as where Xi means the times that the given amino acid X appears at the position i of the alignment and N is the number of sequences in the alignment. All frequencies are compared to a threshold value, which is 25% by default. If a frequency is more than the threshold, the corresponding residue is considered as a motif residue at that position. If the sum frequency of similar residue at the same position is above the threshold, the similar residues are also regarded as motif residues. In MIMOX, there are five similar residue groups (L, I, V; T, S; E, D; Q, N; K, R; F, W); other residues are considered unique. This classification scheme is the same as that used by Mapitope [16, 17] . If no motif residue is found at a given position, then X is used to stand for any amino acid residue. Motif residues at all positions of the alignment are then displayed in a table.