Crosstope Structural Data Bank

Presentation



The Structural Data Bank for Cross-Reactivity is a curate repository of three-dimensional structures of MHC: epitope complexes, focused on immunogenicity, similarity relationships and cross-reactivity prediction.

Cellular immunity has a major role in the surveillance against viral infections. Through the interaction between the T Cell Receptor (TCR) and the Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC), Cytotoxic T Lymphocytes (CTL) are able to recognize viral peptides presented in the cells surface, and thus, eliminate the infected cells. Each TCR is able to interact with thousands of MHC:epitope complexes, but few of these interactions will trigger a CTL response. The capacity of a given T lymphocyte to recognizedifferent peptides in the cleft of a given MHC is defined as Cross-Reactivity, and it has great influence over phenomena such as heterologous immunity and molecular mimicry.

The CrossTope is a curate repository of three-dimensional structures of MHC:epitope complexes, focused on immunogenicity, similarity relashionships and cross-reactivity prediction. Our main idea is that immunogenic epitopes share characteristics that stimulates a Citotoxic T Lymphocyte to respond againstdifferent peptides presented by a given MHC allele. The complexes hosted by these databank were obtained by large-scale in silico construction of three-dimensional models of MHC:peptide complexes, using a new approach developed by our group (D1-EM-D2, Antunes et al, 2010). This structural dataset allowed us to verify that the TCR-interaction surface of pMHC complexes has a shared pattern of charge distribution among complexes with recognized cross-reactivity.

Tools

CROSSTOPE NEW DATABASE DEV VERSION

Explore the new features and updated databank in the CrossTope development version.

Crosstope Development Version link

DOCKTOPE

DockTope is a web-based tool, based on D1-EM-D2 approach, intended to allow the pMHC-I modeling.

DockTope link


Financial Support

Funded by a grant from Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation through the Grand Challenges Exploration Initiative (grant #53049).
Supported by two Brazilian Agencies: CAPES/PNPD (23038.035722/2008-19) and CNPq.

Financial supporters

References 

Research group

The NBLI - Núcleo de Bioinformática do Laboratório de Imunogenética - is a research team focused on immunological mechanisms triggered by viral infections, specially in the identification of possible patterns that can be used as viral targets.

Gustavo Fioravanti Vieira
main investigator

Main investigator

Marcelo A. S. Bragatte
database maintainer researcher

Database maintainer researcher