Identification of helper T-cell epitopes is important in many fields of medicine. We previously used an experimental approach to identify T-cell epitopes in PE38, a truncated bacterial toxin used in immunotoxins. Here, we evaluated the ability of antibodies to DR, DP, or DQ to block T-cell responses to PE38 epitopes in 36 PBMC samples. We predicted the binding affinities of peptides to DR, DP, and DQ alleles using computational tools and analyzed their ability to predict the T-cell epitopes. We found that HLA-DR is responsible for 65% of the responses, DP 24%, and DQ 4%. One epitope that is presented in 20% of the samples (10/50) is entirely DP restricted and was not predicted to bind to DR or DP reference alleles using binding algorithms. We conclude that DP has an important role in helper T-cell response to PE38.
Keywords: DP; HLA class II; MHC class II; T-cell epitopes; epitope prediction; in silico.