Human self-protein CD8+ T-cell epitopes are both positively and negatively selected.

The cellular immune system recognizes self-epitopes in the context of MHC-I molecules. The immunological general view presumes that these self-epitopes are just a background, both positively and negatively selecting T cells. We here estimate the number of epitopes in each human protein for many frequent HLA alleles, and a score representing over or under presentation of epitopes on these proteins. We further show that there is a clear selection for the presentation of specific self-protein types. Proteins presenting many epitopes include, for example, autoimmune regulator (AIRE) upregulated tissue-specific antigens, immune system receptors and proteins with a high expression level. On the other hand, proteins that may be considered less "useful" for the immune system, such as low expression level proteins, are under-presented. We combine our epitope estimate with single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) measures to show that this selection can be directly observed through the fraction of non-synonymous SNP (replacement fraction), which is significantly higher inside epitopes than outside.

Phase-dependent immune evasion of herpesviruses.

Viruses employ various modes to evade immune detection. Two possible evasion modes are a reduction of the number of epitopes presented and the mimicry of host epitopes. The immune evasion efforts are not uniform among viral proteins. The number of epitopes in a given viral protein and the similarity of the epitopes to host peptides can be used as a measure of the viral attempts to hide this protein. Using bioinformatics tools, we here present a genomic analysis of the attempts of four human herpesviruses (herpes simplex virus type 1-human herpesvirus 1, Epstein-Barr virus-human herpesvirus 4, human cytomegalovirus-human herpesvirus 5, and Kaposi's sarcoma-associated herpesvirus-human herpesvirus 8) and one murine herpesvirus (murine herpesvirus 68) to escape from immune detection. We determined the full repertoire of CD8 T-lymphocyte epitopes presented by each viral protein and show that herpesvirus proteins present many fewer epitopes than expected. Furthermore, the epitopes that are presented are more similar to host epitopes than are random viral epitopes, minimizing the immune response. We defined a score for the size of the immune repertoire (the SIR score) based on the number of epitopes in a protein. The numbers of epitopes in proteins expressed in the latent and early phases of infection were significantly smaller than those in proteins expressed in the lytic phase in all tested viruses. The latent and immediate-early epitopes were also more similar to host epitopes than were lytic epitopes. A clear trend emerged from the analysis. In general, herpesviruses demonstrated an effort to evade immune detection. However, within a given herpesvirus, proteins expressed in phases critical to the fate of infection (e.g., early lytic and latent) evaded immune detection more than all others. The application of the SIR score to specific proteins allows us to quantify the importance of immune evasion and to detect optimal targets for immunotherapy and vaccine development.

Virus-epitope vaccine design: informatic matching the HLA-I polymorphism to the virus genome.

Attempts to develop peptide vaccines, based on a limited number of peptides face two problems: HLA polymorphism and the high mutation rate of viral epitopes. We have developed a new genomic method that ensures maximal coverage and thus maximal applicability of the peptide vaccine. The same method also promises a large number of epitopes per HLA to prevent escape via mutations. Our design can be applied swiftly in order to face rapidly emerging viral diseases. We use a genomic scan of all candidate peptides and join them optimally. For a given virus, we use algorithms computing: peptide cleavage probability, transfer through TAP and MHC binding for a large number of HLA alleles. The resulting peptide libraries are pruned for peptides that are not conserved or are too similar to self peptides. We then use a genetic algorithm to produce an optimal protein composed of peptides from this list properly ordered for cleavage. The selected peptides represent an optimal combination to cover all HLA alleles and all viral proteins. We have applied this method to HCV and found that some HCV proteins (mainly envelope proteins) represent much less peptide than expected. A more detailed analysis of the peptide variability shows a balance between the attempts of the immune system to detect less mutating peptides, and the attempts of viruses to mutate peptides and avoid detection by the immune system. In order to show the applicability of our method, we have further used it on HIV-I, Influenza H3N2 and the Avian Flu Viruses.