THE ONLINE HLA PEPTIDE LIGAND/MOTIF DATABASE
Y Yokoyama, S Metcalf, W Hildebrand University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center

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Human T lymphocytes are restricted to viewing antigenic peptides presented by HLA molecules. MHC molecules participate to some degree in most, if not all, adaptive immune responses. Hence, clinicians and researchers alike have a vested interest in HLA molecules and the peptide ligands they present. In our Web-based online database system, the novice as well as the advanced user can publicly access HLA ligand and motif information via a user-friendly interface. Our ligand/motif database system is novel in its approach for using server-side Java Technologies such as Java servlets and JDBC. Applications written in Java are portable to any OS platform that supports Java Virtual Machine and is easily scalable for Java object-oriented language. The user can query for ligand and motif information using various parameters such as allele, amino acid pattern, amino acid sequence, T-cell epitope, etc. The information submitted via Web-browser is pre-processed by server-side applications to dynamically construct the appropriate query, after which the query is sent to the database. The result is post-processed by the server-side applications, and finally the formatted result is sent back to the user via Internet. Here we provide a digital video that demonstrates the power of this new database. Our presentation illustrates how a database user can find the reported motif data for A*2402. Additionally, we provide illustrations of how a database user can find peptide ligands which T-cells see in the context of A*0201. Finally, we demonstrate how a researcher could determine whether a newly sequenced hepatitis M protein contains a stretch of amino acids that matches with any reported motif or peptide ligand. In summary, we offer a searchable, replete, online HLA ligand/motif database to provide scientists with an important bridge to logically access the complex and rapidly expanding HLA ligand and motif data set.