A new set of amino acid descriptors for the development of quantitative sequence-activity modelings of HLA-A*0201 restrictive CTL epitopes

Abstract

A new set of amino acid descriptors, SZOTT (Scores of Zero dimension, One dimension, Two dimension, Three dimension) was derived from principal component analysis on amatrix of 1369 descriptors including 0D, 1D, 2D and 3D information of 20 coded amino acids. SZOTT scales were then employed to represent structures of HLA-A*0201 restrictive CTL epitopes, and further, quantitative sequence-activity modelings (QSAMs) were constructed based on partial least squares and back-propagation artificial neural networks. Satisfying results show that structural information related to biological activities of HLA-A* 0201 restrictive CTL epitopes can be preferably represented by SZOTT scales, which may be a useful structural representation technique for study of QSAMs of peptides.