A powerful combination: the use of positional scanning libraries and biometrical analysis to identify cross-reactive T cell epitopes.

Studies on the elucidation of the specificity of the T cell receptor (TCR) at the antigen and peptide level have contributed to the current understanding of T cell cross-reactivity. Historically, most studies of T cell specificity and degeneracy have relied on the determination of the effects on T cell recognition of amino acid changes at individual positions or MHC binding residues, and thus they have been limited to a small set of possible ligands. Synthetic combinatorial libraries (SCLs), and in particular positional scanning synthetic combinatorial libraries (PS-SCLs) represent collections of millions to trillions of peptides which allow the unbiased elucidation of T cell ligands that stimulate clones of both known and unknown specificity. PS-SCLs have been used successfully to study T cell recognition and to identify and optimize T cell clone (TCC) epitopes in infectious diseases, autoimmune disorders and tumor antigens. PS-SCL-based biometrical analysis represents a further refinement in the analysis of the data derived from the screening of a library with a TCC. It combines this data with information derived from protein sequence databases to identify natural peptide ligands. PS-SCL-based biometrical analysis provides a method for the determination of new microbial antigen and autoantigen sequences based solely on functional data rather than sequence homology or motifs, making the method ideally suited for the prediction and identification of both native and cross-reactive epitopes by virtue of its ability to integrate the examination of trillions of peptides in a systematic manner with all of the protein sequences in a given database. We review here the application of PS-SCLs and biometrical analysis to identify cross-reactive T cell epitopes, as well as the current efforts to refine this strategy.