High Throughput pMHC-I Tetramer Library Production Using Chaperone Mediated Peptide Exchange

Peptide exchange technologies are essential for the generation of pMHC-multimer libraries for probing diverse, polyclonal TCR repertoires in various settings. Here we report, using the molecular chaperone TAPBPR, a robust method for the capture of stable, empty MHC-I molecules, which can be readily tetramerized and loaded with peptides of choice in a high-throughput manner. Alternatively, catalytic amounts of TAPBPR can be used to exchange 'goldilocks' peptides with high-affinity peptides of interest in an overnight reaction. Using the same system, we describe high-throughput assays to validate binding of multiple candidate peptides on the empty MHCI groove. Combined with tetramer-barcoding via a multi-modal cellular indexing technology, ECCITE-seq, our approach allows a combined analysis of TCR repertoires and other T-cell transcription profiles together with their cognate pMHC-I specificities in a single experiment. Overall design: spleen, jurkat, and neuroblastoma samples