Structural Modeling of Lymphocyte Receptors and Their Antigens.

ABSTRACT

Structural modeling plays a key role in protein function prediction on a genome-wide scale. For B and T lymphocyte receptors, the critical functional question is which antigens and epitopes are targeted? With emerging B cell receptor (BCR) and T cell receptor (TCR) sequencing methods improving in both breadth and depth, there is a growing need for methods that can help answer this question. Since lymphocyte-antigen recognition depends on complementarity, structural modeling is likely to play an important role in understanding antigen specificity and affinity. In the case of BCRs, such modeling methods have a long history in the study and design of antibodies. However, for TCRs there are relatively few publicly available modeling tools, and, to our knowledge, none that incorporate interaction between TCRs and peptide-MHC (pMHC) complexes. Here, we provide a web-based tool, ImmuneScape ( https//sysimm.org/immune-scape/ ), to carry out TCR-pMHC modeling as a first step toward structure-based function prediction.