Project description:HLA-I molecules bind short peptides and present them to CD8+ T cells for TCR recognition. The length of HLA-I ligands typically ranges from 8 to 12 amino acids, but high variability is observed between different alleles. Here we used recent HLA peptidomics data to analyze in an unbiased way peptide length distributions over 85 different HLA-I alleles. Our results revealed clear clustering of HLA-I alleles with distinct peptide length distributions, which enabled us to unravel some of the molecular basis of peptide length distributions and predict peptide length distributions based on HLA-I sequences only. We further took advantage of our collection of curated HLA peptidomics studies to investigate multiple specificity in HLA-I molecules and validated these observations with binding assays. Explicitly modeling peptide length distributions and multiple specificity significantly improved predictions of naturally presented HLA-I ligands, as demonstrated in an independent benchmarking based on ten newly generated HLA peptidomics datasets from meningioma samples.
