Skip to main content

Structure-Based Prediction of Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC) Epitopes

  • Protocol
  • First Online:
Immunoproteomics

Part of the book series: Methods in Molecular Biology ((MIMB,volume 1061))

  • 2921 Accesses

Abstract

Because of the enormous diversity of both MHC proteins and peptide epitopes, computational epitope prediction methods are needed in order to supplement limited experimental data. These prediction methods are useful for guiding experiments and have many potential biomedical applications. Unlike popular sequence-based methods, structure-based epitope prediction methods can predict epitopes for multiple MHC types with highly distinct peptide binding propensities. In this chapter, we describe in detail our previously developed structure-based epitope prediction methods for both class I and class II MHC proteins. We also discuss the relative advantages and disadvantages of sequence-based versus structure-based methods and how to evaluate prediction performance.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Protocol
USD 49.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 89.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 119.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 169.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

References

  1. Todd JA, Bell JI, McDevitt HO (1987) HLA-DQ beta gene contributes to susceptibility and resistance to insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus. Nature 329:599–604

    Article  PubMed  CAS  Google Scholar 

  2. Todd JA, Wicker LS (2001) Genetic protection from the inflammatory disease type 1 diabetes in humans and animal models. Immunity 15:387–395

    Article  PubMed  CAS  Google Scholar 

  3. Baisch JM, Weeks T, Giles R, Hoover M, Stastny P, Capra JD (1990) Analysis of HLA-DQ genotypes and susceptibility in insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus. N Engl J Med 322:1836–1841

    Article  PubMed  CAS  Google Scholar 

  4. Wordsworth BP, Lanchbury JS, Sakkas LI, Welsh KI, Panayi GS, Bell JI (1989) HLA-DR4 subtype frequencies in rheumatoid arthritis indicate that DRB1 is the major susceptibility locus within the HLA class II region. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 86:10049–10053

    Article  PubMed  CAS  Google Scholar 

  5. Fogdell A, Hillert J, Sachs C, Olerup O (1995) The multiple sclerosis- and narcolepsy-associated HLA class II haplotype includes the DRB5*0101 allele. Tissue Antigens 46:333–336

    Article  PubMed  CAS  Google Scholar 

  6. Oksenberg JR, Barcellos LF, Cree BA, Baranzini SE, Bugawan TL, Khan O, Lincoln RR, Swerdlin A, Mignot E, Lin L, Goodin D, Erlich HA, Schmidt S, Thomson G, Reich DE, Pericak-Vance MA, Haines JL, Hauser SL (2004) Mapping multiple sclerosis susceptibility to the HLA-DR locus in African Americans. Am J Hum Genet 74:160–167

    Article  PubMed  CAS  Google Scholar 

  7. Sollid LM, Markussen G, Ek J, Gjerde H, Vartdal F, Thorsby E (1989) Evidence for a primary association of celiac disease to a particular HLA-DQ alpha/beta heterodimer. J Exp Med 169:345–350

    Article  PubMed  CAS  Google Scholar 

  8. Matsuki K, Grumet FC, Lin X, Gelb M, Guilleminault C, Dement WC, Mignot E (1992) DQ (rather than DR) gene marks susceptibility to narcolepsy. Lancet 339:1052

    Article  PubMed  CAS  Google Scholar 

  9. Mignot E, Lin L, Rogers W, Honda Y, Qiu X, Lin X, Okun M, Hohjoh H, Miki T, Hsu S, Leffell M, Grumet F, Fernandez-Vina M, Honda M, Risch N (2001) Complex HLA-DR and -DQ interactions confer risk of narcolepsy-cataplexy in three ethnic groups. Am J Hum Genet 68:686–699

    Article  PubMed  CAS  Google Scholar 

  10. Muller U, Akdis CA, Fricker M, Akdis M, Blesken T, Bettens F, Blaser K (1998) Successful immunotherapy with T-cell epitope peptides of bee venom phospholipase A2 induces specific T-cell anergy in patients allergic to bee venom. J Allergy Clin Immunol 101:747–754

    Article  PubMed  CAS  Google Scholar 

  11. Maverakis E, Beech J, Stevens DB, Ametani A, Brossay L, van den Elzen P, Mendoza R, Thai Q, Macias LH, Ethell D, Campagnoni CW, Campagnoni AT, Sette A, Sercarz EE (2003) Autoreactive T cells can be protected from tolerance induction through competition by flanking determinants for access to class II MHC. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 100:5342–5347

    Article  PubMed  CAS  Google Scholar 

  12. Marcotte GV, Braun CM, Norman PS, Nicodemus CF, Kagey-Sobotka A, Lichtenstein LM, Essayan DM (1998) Effects of peptide therapy on ex vivo T-cell responses. J Allergy Clin Immunol 101:506–513

    Article  PubMed  CAS  Google Scholar 

  13. von Garnier C, Astori M, Kettner A, Dufour N, Heusser C, Corradin G, Spertini F (2000) Allergen-derived long peptide immunotherapy down-regulates specific IgE response and protects from anaphylaxis. Eur J Immunol 30:1638–1645

    Article  Google Scholar 

  14. Haselden BM, Kay AB, Larche M (1999) Immunoglobulin E-independent major histocompatibility complex-restricted T cell peptide epitope-induced late asthmatic reactions. J Exp Med 189:1885–1894

    Article  PubMed  CAS  Google Scholar 

  15. Oldfield WL, Larche M, Kay AB (2002) Effect of T-cell peptides derived from Fel d 1 on allergic reactions and cytokine production in patients sensitive to cats: a randomised controlled trial. Lancet 360:47–53

    Article  PubMed  CAS  Google Scholar 

  16. Larche M (2006) Immunoregulation by targeting T cells in the treatment of allergy and asthma. Curr Opin Immunol 18:745–750

    Article  PubMed  CAS  Google Scholar 

  17. Kim Y, Ponomarenko J, Zhu Z, Tamang D, Wang P, Greenbaum J, Lundegaard C, Sette A, Lund O, Bourne PE, Nielsen M, Peters B (2012) Immune epitope database analysis resource. Nucleic Acids Res 40:W525–W530

    Article  PubMed  CAS  Google Scholar 

  18. Kim Y, Ponomarenko J, Zhu Z, Tamang D, Wang P, Greenbaum J, Lundegaard C, Sette A, Lund O, Bourne PE, Nielsen M, Peters B (2012) IEDB T cell epitope prediction tools. http://tools.immuneepitope.org/main/html/tcell_tools.html.

  19. Abagyan R, Totrov M (1994) Biased probability Monte Carlo conformational searches and electrostatic calculations for peptides and proteins. J Mol Biol 235:983–1002

    Article  PubMed  CAS  Google Scholar 

  20. Madden DR (1995) The three-dimensional structure of peptide–MHC complexes. Annu Rev Immunol 13:587–622

    Article  PubMed  CAS  Google Scholar 

  21. Jardetzky TS, Brown JH, Gorga JC, Stern LJ, Urban RG, Strominger JL, Wiley DC (1996) Crystallographic analysis of endogenous peptides associated with HLA-DR1 suggests a common, polyproline II-like conformation for bound peptides. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 93:734–738

    Article  PubMed  CAS  Google Scholar 

  22. Bordner AJ, Abagyan R (2006) Ab initio prediction of peptide-MHC binding geometry for diverse class I MHC allotypes. Proteins 63:512–526

    Article  PubMed  CAS  Google Scholar 

  23. Bordner AJ (2010) Towards universal structure-based prediction of class II MHC epitopes for diverse allotypes. PLoS One 5:e14383

    Article  PubMed  CAS  Google Scholar 

  24. Fernandez-Recio J, Totrov M, Abagyan R (2002) Soft protein-protein docking in internal coordinates. Protein Sci 11:280–291

    Article  PubMed  CAS  Google Scholar 

  25. Rose PW, Beran B, Bi C, Bluhm WF, Dimitropoulos D, Goodsell DS, Prlic A, Quesada M, Quinn GB, Westbrook JD, Young J, Yukich B, Zardecki C, Berman HM, Bourne PE (2011) The RCSB protein data bank: redesigned web site and web services. Nucleic Acids Res 39:D392–D401

    Article  PubMed  CAS  Google Scholar 

  26. Acharya KR, Lloyd MD (2005) The advantages and limitations of protein crystal structures. Trends Pharmacol Sci 26:10–14

    Article  PubMed  CAS  Google Scholar 

  27. B-Rao C, Subramanian J, Sharma SD (2009) Managing protein flexibility in docking and its applications. Drug Discov Today 14:394–400

    Article  PubMed  CAS  Google Scholar 

  28. Betancourt MR, Thirumalai D (1999) Pair potentials for protein folding: choice of reference states and sensitivity of predicted native states to variations in the interaction schemes. Protein Sci 8:361–369

    Article  PubMed  CAS  Google Scholar 

  29. Zhang C, Liu S, Zhou H, Zhou Y (2004) An accurate, residue-level, pair potential of mean force for folding and binding based on the distance-scaled, ideal-gas reference state. Protein Sci 13:400–411

    Article  PubMed  CAS  Google Scholar 

  30. Breiman L (2001) Random forests. Mach Learn 45:5–32

    Article  Google Scholar 

  31. R Development Core Team (2008) R: a language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna

    Google Scholar 

  32. Peters B, Sidney J, Bourne P, Bui HH, Buus S, Doh G, Fleri W, Kronenberg M, Kubo R, Lund O, Nemazee D, Ponomarenko JV, Sathiamurthy M, Schoenberger S, Stewart S, Surko P, Way S, Wilson S, Sette A (2005) The immune epitope database and analysis resource: from vision to blueprint. PLoS Biol 3:e91

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  33. Lata S, Bhasin M, Raghava GP (2009) MHCBN 4.0: a database of MHC/TAP binding peptides and T-cell epitopes. BMC Res Notes 2:61

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  34. Toseland CP, Clayton DJ, McSparron H, Hemsley SL, Blythe MJ, Paine K, Doytchinova IA, Guan P, Hattotuwagama CK, Flower DR (2005) AntiJen: a quantitative immunology database integrating functional, thermodynamic, kinetic, biophysical, and cellular data. Immunome Res 1:4

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  35. Lin HH, Zhang GL, Tongchusak S, Reinherz EL, Brusic V (2008) Evaluation of MHC-II peptide binding prediction servers: applications for vaccine research. BMC Bioinformatics 9(Suppl 12):S22

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  36. Zhang GL, Lin HH, Keskin DB, Reinherz EL, Brusic V (2011) Dana-Farber repository for machine learning in immunology. J Immunol Methods 374:18–25

    Article  PubMed  CAS  Google Scholar 

  37. El-Manzalawy Y, Dobbs D, Honavar V (2008) On evaluating MHC-II binding peptide prediction methods. PLoS One 3:e3268

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  38. Bordner AJ, Mittelmann HD (2010) Prediction of the binding affinities of peptides to class II MHC using a regularized thermodynamic model. BMC Bioinformatics 11:41

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  39. Wang P, Sidney J, Kim Y, Sette A, Lund O, Nielsen M, Peters B (2010) Peptide binding predictions for HLA DR, DP and DQ molecules. BMC Bioinformatics 11:568

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  40. Nielsen M, Lund O (2009) NN-align. An artificial neural network-based alignment algorithm for MHC class II peptide binding prediction. BMC Bioinformatics 10:296

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  41. Rognan D, Lauemoller SL, Holm A, Buus S, Tschinke V (1999) Predicting binding affinities of protein ligands from three-dimensional models: application to peptide binding to class I major histocompatibility proteins. J Med Chem 42:4650–4658

    Article  PubMed  CAS  Google Scholar 

  42. Schueler-Furman O, Altuvia Y, Sette A, Margalit H (2000) Structure-based prediction of binding peptides to MHC class I molecules: application to a broad range of MHC alleles. Protein Sci 9:1838–1846

    Article  PubMed  CAS  Google Scholar 

  43. Liu Z, Dominy BN, Shakhnovich EI (2004) Structural mining: self-consistent design on flexible protein-peptide docking and transferable binding affinity potential. J Am Chem Soc 126:8515–8528

    Article  PubMed  CAS  Google Scholar 

  44. Antes I, Siu SW, Lengauer T (2006) DynaPred: a structure and sequence based method for the prediction of MHC class I binding peptide sequences and conformations. Bioinformatics 22:e16–e24

    Article  PubMed  CAS  Google Scholar 

  45. Knapp B, Omasits U, Frantal S, Schreiner W (2009) A critical cross-validation of high throughput structural binding prediction methods for pMHC. J Comput Aided Mol Des 23:301–307

    Article  PubMed  CAS  Google Scholar 

  46. Yanover C, Bradley P (2011) Large-scale characterization of peptide-MHC binding landscapes with structural simulations. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 108:6981–6986

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  47. Davies MN, Sansom CE, Beazley C, Moss DS (2003) A novel predictive technique for the MHC class II peptide-binding interaction. Mol Med 9:220–225

    Article  PubMed  CAS  Google Scholar 

  48. Schafroth HD, Floudas CA (2004) Predicting peptide binding to MHC pockets via molecular modeling, implicit solvation, and global optimization. Proteins 54:534–556

    Article  PubMed  CAS  Google Scholar 

  49. Tong JC, Zhang GL, Tan TW, August JT, Brusic V, Ranganathan S (2006) Prediction of HLA-DQ3.2beta ligands: evidence of multiple registers in class II binding peptides. Bioinformatics 22:1232–1238

    Article  PubMed  CAS  Google Scholar 

  50. Zhang H, Wang P, Papangelopoulos N, Xu Y, Sette A, Bourne PE, Lund O, Ponomarenko J, Nielsen M, Peters B (2010) Limitations of Ab initio predictions of peptide binding to MHC class II molecules. PLoS One 5:e9272

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  51. Patronov A, Dimitrov I, Flower DR, Doytchinova I (2011) Peptide binding prediction for the human class II MHC allele HLA-DP2: a molecular docking approach. BMC Struct Biol 11:32

    Article  PubMed  CAS  Google Scholar 

  52. Doytchinova I, Petkov P, Dimitrov I, Atanasova M, Flower DR (2011) HLA-DP2 binding prediction by molecular dynamics simulations. Protein Sci 20:1918–1928

    Article  PubMed  CAS  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgment

This work was supported by the Mayo Clinic.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2013 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

About this protocol

Cite this protocol

Bordner, A.J. (2013). Structure-Based Prediction of Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC) Epitopes. In: Fulton, K., Twine, S. (eds) Immunoproteomics. Methods in Molecular Biology, vol 1061. Humana Press, Totowa, NJ. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-62703-589-7_20

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-62703-589-7_20

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Humana Press, Totowa, NJ

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-62703-588-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-62703-589-7

  • eBook Packages: Springer Protocols

Publish with us

Policies and ethics