NetMHCpan-3.0; improved prediction of binding to MHC class I molecules integrating information from multiple receptor and peptide length datasets

Binding of peptides to MHC class I molecules (MHC-I) is essential for antigen presentation to cytotoxic T-cells.

Here, we demonstrate how a simple alignment step allowing insertions and deletions in a pan-specific MHC-I binding machine-learning model enables combining information across both multiple MHC molecules and peptide lengths. This pan-allele/pan-length algorithm significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, and captures differences in the length profile of binders to different MHC molecules leading to increased accuracy for ligand identification. Using this model, we demonstrate that percentile ranks in contrast to affinity-based thresholds are optimal for ligand identification due to uniform sampling of the MHC space.