HLA-A3 supermotif defined by quantitative structure-activity relationship analysis

Activation of a cytotoxic T cell requires specific binding of antigenic peptides to major histocompatibility complex (MHC) molecules. This paper reports a study of peptides binding to members of the HLA-A3 superfamily using a recently developed 2D-QSAR method, called the additive method. Four alleles with high phenotype frequency were included in the study: A*0301, A*1101, A*3101 and A*6801. The influence of each of the 20 amino acids at each position of the peptide on binding was studied. A refined A3 supertype motif was defined in the study.