HLA-EpiCheck: novel approach for HLA B-cell epitope prediction using 3D-surface patch descriptors derived from molecular dynamic simulations.

Motivation: The human leukocyte antigen (HLA) system is the main cause of organ transplant loss through the recognition of HLAs present on the graft by donor-specific antibodies raised by the recipient. It is therefore of key importance to identify all potentially immunogenic B-cell epitopes on HLAs in order to refine organ allocation. Such HLAs epitopes are currently characterized by the presence of polymorphic residues called "eplets". However, many polymorphic positions in HLAs sequences are not yet experimentally confirmed as eplets associated with a HLA epitope. Moreover, structural studies of these epitopes only consider 3D static structures.

Results: We present here a machine-learning approach for predicting HLA epitopes, based on 3D-surface patches and molecular dynamics simulations. A collection of 3D-surface patches labeled as Epitope (2117) or Nonepitope (4769) according to Human Leukocyte Antigen Eplet Registry information was derived from 207 HLAs (61 solved and 146 predicted structures). Descriptors derived from static and dynamic patch properties were computed and three tree-based models were trained on a reduced non-redundant dataset. HLA-Epicheck is the prediction system formed by the three models. It leverages dynamic descriptors of 3D-surface patches for more than half of its prediction performance. Epitope predictions on unconfirmed eplets (absent from the initial dataset) are compared with experimental results and notable consistency is found.

Availability and implementation: Structural data and MD trajectories are deposited as open data under doi: 10.57745/GXZHH8. In-house scripts and machine-learning models for HLA-EpiCheck are available from https://gitlab.inria.fr/capsid.public_codes/hla-epicheck.