24c Computing Free Energies of Peptide-Mediated Protein-Protein Interactions in Modeling Immune System Response

Jindal K. Shah1, Dilip Asthagiri2, and Michael E. Paulaitis1. (1) Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210, (2) Los Alamos National Laboratory, Group T-12, MS-B268, Los Alamos, NM 87545

Immune system response requires T-cell activation. On the molecular level, peptide-specific signals delivered through the engagement of a T-cell receptor (TCR) on the cell surface with the peptide-major histocompatibility complex (pMHC) on the surface of an antigen-presenting cell (APC). Although additional co-stimulatory signals are delivered through the interactions of accessory molecules on the T-cell surface with complexes on the surface of the APC, TCR activation depends critically on the peptide-mediated binding affinity of the TCR with the MHC. The alteration of a single amino acid residue of the peptide, for example, can produce a dramatic change from no response at all to a strong response. Surface plasmon resonance studies of TCR/pMHC interactions show that while the range of binding affinities of stimulatory pMHC ligands is low compared to that for antibody-antigen interactions, they need to be sufficiently high to induce T-cell activation. This suggests that important local interactions need to be identified in an otherwise ``noisy" background. In this talk, we describe a novel method based on the Potential Distribution Theorem and large-scale molecular dynamics simulations for computing relative TCR/pMHC binding affinities as a function of the amino acid sequence of the peptide. Results are shown for the human T-cell lymphotropic virus Tax peptide (LLFGYPVYV) and a single amino acid mutant (P6A) bound to the A6/HLA-A2 T-cell/MHC complex. These results are discussed in the context of the development of complementary high-throughput pMHC microarrays and bioinformatic databases to screen for peptide antigens.