Artemis: Mass Spectrometry-Based Identification of MHC-Presented Peptides Across Alleles, Classes, and Species Using

Kathryn A K Finton1, Ulysses N Foote-McNabb1, Elise C Wilcox2

  • 1Division of Basic Science, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, Seattle, WA, USA.

The current "gold standard" for the identification of MHC-restricted peptides is conventional immunoprecipitation/mass spectrometry (MS); however, this approach requires a relatively large amount of sample, complex purification procedures, and computational analyses to assign peptides to individual alleles. Here, we provide instructions for the expression, purification, and MS identification of MHC-presented peptides of human and non-human, classical and non-classical, class I and class II proteins using a readily expressible, soluble, and easily purifiable single-chain dimer construct. This procedure enables the identification of up to tens of thousands of allele-specific peptides per run for peptidomics, ligandomics, therapeutic targeting, and motif analyses. Also included are instructions for construct design, streamlined lentiviral transfection and transduction, and computational methods for high-throughput processing of MS results, yielding high confidence peptide lists, motifs, and multiple analytics.

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