One additional procedure that we and other groups have used after screening the genomes of pathogens for putative binding peptides is to compare those candidate epitopes with known host protein sequences, and in some cases we have found peptides that are identical to host peptides. This is very important because several critical diseases are caused by pathogen molecular mimicry, that is, some diseases, such as diabetes, dengue hemorrhagic fever, and Guillian Barret syndrome, are hypothesized to be the result of infections that induce self-reactive pathogenic immune responses.