Ranking antibody binding epitopes and proteins across samples from whole proteome tiled linear peptides

Ultradense peptide binding arrays that can probe millions of linear peptides comprising the entire proteomes of human or mouse, or hundreds of thousands of microbes, are powerful tools for studying the antibody repertoire in serum samples to understand adaptive immune responses.

There are few tools for exploring high-dimensional, significant and reproducible antibody targets for ultradense peptide binding arrays at the linear peptide, epitope (grouping of adjacent peptides), and protein level across multiple samples/subjects (i.e. epitope spread or immunogenic regions of proteins) for understanding the heterogeneity of immune responses.

We developed Hierarchical antibody binding Epitopes and pROteins from liNear peptides (HERON), an R package, which can identify immunogenic epitopes, using meta-analyses and spatial clustering techniques to explore antibody targets at various resolution and confidence levels, that can be found consistently across a specified number of samples through the entire proteome to study antibody responses for diagnostics or treatment. Our approach estimates significance values at the linear peptide (probe), epitope, and protein level to identify top candidates for validation. We tested the performance of predictions on all three levels using correlation between technical replicates and comparison of epitope calls on two datasets, and results showed HERON's competitiveness in estimating false discovery rates and finding general and sample-level regions of interest for antibody binding.

The HERON R package is available at Bioconductor https://bioconductor.org/packages/release/bioc/html/HERON.html.