As we have mentioned previously, several groups have researched algorithms and programs that may assist and automate phage display based epitope mapping. Based on the dependency on antigen structure, the existing programs can be classified into three categories. FINDMAP belongs to the first category, which is independent of any structural information. FINDMAP has been implemented as a C++ program. It aligns a probe (e.g. a consensus sequence derived from a set of mimotopes) to the sequence of native antigen, allowing any permutation of the probe sequence. It uses a two-part scoring system to evaluate the quality of alignments and a branch-andbound algorithm to find an alignment with maximum score [13] .