TCRBuilder: multi-state T-cell receptor structure prediction

Abstract

Motivation: T-cell receptors (TCRs) are immune proteins that primarily target peptide antigens presented by the major histocompatibility complex. They tend to have lower specificity and affinity than their antibody counterparts, and their binding sites have been shown to adopt multiple conformations, which is potentially an important factor for their polyspecificity. None of the current TCR-modelling tools predict this variability which limits our ability to accurately predict TCR binding.

Results: We present TCRBuilder, a multi-state TCR structure prediction tool. Given a paired αβTCR sequence, TCRBuilder returns a model or an ensemble of models covering the potential conformations of the binding site. This enables the analysis of structurally driven polyspecificity in TCRs, which is not possible with existing tools.

Availability and implementation: http://opig.stats.ox.ac.uk/resources.

Contact: deane@stats.ox.ac.uk.

Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.