MHC I Stabilizing Potential of Computer-Designed Octapeptides

Abstract EN

Experimental results are presented for 180 in silico designed octapeptide sequences and their stabilizing effects on the major histocompatibility class I molecule H-2Kb.

Peptide sequence design was accomplished by a combination of an ant colony optimization algorithm with artificial neural network classifiers.

Experimental tests yielded nine H-2Kb stabilizing and 171 nonstabilizing peptides.

28 among the nonstabilizing octapeptides contain canonical motif residues known to be favorable for MHC I stabilization.

For characterization of the area covered by stabilizing and non-stabilizing octapeptides in sequence space, we visualized the distribution of 100,603 octapeptides using a self-organizing map.

The experimental results present evidence that the canonical sequence motives of the SYFPEITHI database on their own are insufficient for predicting MHC I protein stabilization.