Identification of Vaccinia Virus HLA Class I Peptides Presented by the Immune System

Seeking to identify HLA class I peptides that originate from vaccinia virus proteins to understand the mechanism of immune protection. Note that vaccinia-infected B cells will still continue to present (primarily) a wide variety of peptides originating from endogenous proteins; this data set contains evidence for more than 5000 such peptides. The objective and challenge is to detect and identify the peptides that originate from the pathogen (vaccinia virus) in the presence (background) of this large number of endogensous 'self' peptides. Keywords: Peptide search results from multiple injections of multiple strong cation exchange fractions combined into one set of results. Immortalized B-cells (Priess cells) were infected with live vaccinia virus and incubated 24 hours; HLA proteins binding and presenting peptide fragments of cellular proteins (HLA class I molecules/peptide complexes) were immunopurified and the peptides were identified by 2-dimensional liquid chromatography and tandem mass spectrometry.