22, paired two-tailed Student’s t-test). This suggests selleck chemical that stability in general is a better indicator of immunogenicity than affinity is. The above comparison of immunogenic peptides and peptides of unknown immunogenicity is potentially flawed. First, these peptides have been selected for purposes other than the present study and

do not necessarily represent a random, representative and unbiased sample of the peptide space. Second, the data on these peptides are not particularly homogenous, since the database entries on immunogenicity are the result of the work over several decades by many different scientists using many different techniques. Third, the data might have be skewed due to the frequent use of predictions based on more or less complicated MHC-I-binding motifs, which may have led to an oversampling of peptides carrying perfect motif matches resulting in a likely overrepresentation of high-affinity and -stability binders. Fourth, the data are not error free. The immunogenic peptide sequences identified by synthesis and functional analysis do not necessarily represent the final stimulatory moieties (as first noted by

Ploegh and colleagues [[21]]). Also, in most cases it has not been examined whether the peptide sequences used here as control peptides are truly nonimmunogenic (albeit the frequency of random peptides Mitomycin C research buy being immunogenic a priori is low [[22]]). Thus, one should be cautious when interpreting the data obtained with this panel of peptides. To circumvent the above problem and reliably evaluate how affinity and/or stability Clostridium perfringens alpha toxin correlate with immunogenicity, one should ideally perform a systematic and unbiased

analysis of all possible overlapping peptides from a model antigen or organism; however, the resources required would be prohibitive. As a work-round, we analyzed the stability of peptide-HLA-A*02:01 complexes reported in a recent study by Sette and colleagues on the T-cell specificities recognized after infecting HLA-A*02:01 transgenic mice with vaccinia virus [[6]]. This is one of the most comprehensive and careful studies of its kind: it used a very broad HLA-A*02:01 motif definition to capture an estimated 99.8% of all possible 9- and 10-mer binders from a large collection of proteins known to be targeted by CTLs; and it examined the immunogenicity of a representative sample of high-affinity binding peptides both following vaccinia infection as well as after peptide immunization.