A large fraction of HLA class I ligands are proteasome-generated spliced peptides
Juliane Liepe, Fabio Marino, John Sidney, Anita Jeko, Daniel E. Bunting, Alessandro Sette, Peter M. Kloetzel, Michael P. H. Stumpf, Albert J. R. Heck, Michele Mishto
Science 21 Oct 2016: Vol. 354, pp. 354-358
To identify the presence of pathogens and other maladies, the cells present protein fragments (epitopes) on their surface for targeting by the immune system. These epitopes are created by the action of the proteasome, and then they are displayed by the human leukocyte antigen class 1 (HLA-1) system. The proteasome can also cut proteins and paste different pieces together, forming peptides that do not correspond to the original protein sequences. This process is called proteasome catalyzed peptide splicing and was thought to be rather rare.
In this study, the authors developed a two-dimensional peptide prefractionation strategy followed by a hybrid peptide fragmentation method (electron transfer higher-energy collision dissociation) for peptide identification. The database search employed an adapted target-decoy approach and a vast proteome-wide human spliced peptide database.
This methodology led to the identification of 6592 nonspliced and 3417 spliced peptides 9 to 12 residues in length, which represents 34% of the total of identified antigenic peptides. In contrast, searching these data sets only against the standard Swissprot human proteome database wrongly assigned 655 of the antigenic peptides as nonspliced peptides, while not accounting for the spliced peptides. |