El. Huczko et al., CHARACTERISTICS OF ENDOGENOUS PEPTIDES ELUTED FROM THE CLASS-I MHC MOLECULE HLA-B7 DETERMINED BY MASS-SPECTROMETRY AND COMPUTER MODELING, The Journal of immunology, 151(5), 1993, pp. 2572-2587
Microcapillary HPLC electrospray ionization tandem mass spectrometry w
as used to sequence 15 peptides eluted from HLA-B7. Sequence alignment
implicated four peptide positions in specific interactions with the c
lass I molecule, and their importance was confirmed using synthetic pe
ptides. Because no crystal structure for HLA-B7 was available, compute
r-assisted modeling was used to understand novel aspects of peptide bi
nding specificity and to accurately predict the effect of defined chan
ges in peptide structure. The results demonstrate that mass-spectromet
ric sequencing coupled with computer-assisted modeling can be used in
the absence of a crystal structure to make accurate predictions concer
ning requirements for peptide binding to class I molecules. These tech
niques may be valuable to predict or engineer T cell epitopes.