Margalit Hanah, Altuvia Yael
Department of Molecular Genetics and Biotechnology, The Hebrew University Hadassah Medical School, Jerusalem 91120, Israel.
Novartis Found Symp. 2003;254:77-90; discussion 91-101, 216-22, 250-2.
Cytotoxic T cells recognize short antigenic peptides, the processing products of protein antigens, when they are bound to major histocompatibility complex (MHC) class I molecules. Peptide binding to MHC molecules has been studied extensively in numerous laboratories, providing vast amounts of sequence and structure data that have been used as a rich source for bioinformatic research. MHC-bound peptides and their flanking sequences provide information about the sequence requirements of the different processing stages, in particular, the cleavage by the proteasome and the binding to MHC molecules. Elucidation of these sequence requirements sheds light on the evolutionary forces that have shaped and designed these peptides, and should lead to the development of an integrative predictive algorithm. Remarkably, the peptide sequence and structure data are also valuable for the study of biological questions that are apparently unrelated to cellular immunity, namely, sequence-structure relationship and genome annotation. Here we describe our computational analyses of MHC-bound peptides, applied to all these biological topics.
细胞毒性T细胞识别短的抗原肽，即蛋白质抗原的加工产物，当它们与主要组织相容性复合体（MHC）I类分子结合时。肽与MHC分子的结合已在众多实验室中得到广泛研究，提供了大量的序列和结构数据，这些数据已成为生物信息学研究的丰富来源。与MHC结合的肽及其侧翼序列提供了关于不同加工阶段序列要求的信息，特别是蛋白酶体的切割以及与MHC分子的结合。阐明这些序列要求有助于揭示塑造和设计这些肽的进化力量，并应导致开发一种综合预测算法。值得注意的是，肽序列和结构数据对于研究明显与细胞免疫无关的生物学问题，即序列-结构关系和基因组注释，也很有价值。在这里，我们描述了我们对与MHC结合的肽的计算分析，应用于所有这些生物学主题。
