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Updated: Aug 26, 2025

Immunopeptidomics: Isolation of Mouse and Human MHC Class I- and II-Associated Peptides for Mass Spectrometry Analysis
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Published on: October 15, 2021

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Post-translational modifications reshape the antigenic landscape of the MHC I immunopeptidome in tumors

Assaf Kacen1, Aaron Javitt1, Matthias P Kramer1

  • 1Department of Immunology, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel.

Nature Biotechnology
|October 6, 2022
PubMed

Post-translational modification (PTM) of antigens provides an additional source of specificities targeted by immune responses to tumors or pathogens, but identifying antigen PTMs and assessing their role in shaping the immunopeptidome is challenging. Here we describe the Protein Modification Integrated Search Engine (PROMISE), an antigen discovery pipeline that enables the analysis of 29 different PTM combinations from multiple clinical cohorts and cell lines. We expanded the antigen landscape, uncovering human leukocyte antigen class I binding motifs defined by specific PTMs with haplotype-specific binding preferences and revealing disease-specific modified targets, including thousands of new cancer-specific antigens that can be shared between patients and across cancer types. Furthermore, we uncovered a subset of modified peptides that are specific to cancer tissue and driven by post-translational changes that occurred in the tumor proteome. Our findings highlight principles of PTM-driven antigenicity, which may have broad implications for T cell-mediated therapies in cancer and beyond.

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