Biology subjects

Deleuran, S. N.

Publications and source records attributed to Deleuran, S. N..

4 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2026

TCRdenoise - an unsupervised similarity-based approach for denoising of TCR-pMHC specificity data

Public repositories of T cell receptor (TCR)-peptide-MHC (pMHC) interactions constitute a critical resource for studying adaptive immunity and developing predictive models of TCR specificity. However, recent evidence suggests that a substantial fraction of reported TCR-pMHC interactions may be incorrectly annotated, limiting the quality of downstream analyses and machine learning applications. Here, we present an unsupervised sequence similarity-based framework for denoising peptide-specific TCR repertoires. The method combines pairwise TCR similarity metrics derived from TCRbase and TCRdist3 with hierarchical clustering and a novel adaptation of the silhouette score designed to address the prevalence of singleton clusters and highly imbalanced cluster structures. By incorporating a pseudo-cluster containing singleton and background TCRs, and by optimising both clustering distance thresholds and minimum cluster-size criteria, the proposed approach identifies TCRs likely to represent true antigen-specific binders while filtering putative noise. Using experimentally validated repertoires from TCRvdb, we demonstrate that the modified silhouette score closely tracks clustering solutions that maximise separation between binding and non-binding TCRs, achieving strong agreement with independent validation based on the Matthews correlation coefficient. Extension to a large collection of peptide-specific TCR data revealed a strong negative correlation between the percentage of TCRs classified as noise and the predictive performance of peptide-specific binding models. Further, the denoising classification labels on this data set were corroborated using structural modeling confidence scores of the peptide-TCR interface extracted from a refined AlphaFold 3 modeling pipeline. Additionally, retraining NetTCR on denoised data improved internal cross-validated performance compared with models trained on the full data set, whereas models trained exclusively on TCRs classified as noise performed close to random. Together, these results demonstrate that sequence similarity-based denoising can effectively enrich for biologically meaningful TCR-pMHC interactions and improve the quality of training data for predictive immunological models. The proposed framework provides a scalable strategy for improving the reliability of public TCR databases and facilitating the development of more accurate TCR specificity prediction methods.

bioinformatics↗

bioRxiv2026

Revised Adaptive Immune Receptor Data in the Immune Epitope Database

The Immune Epitope Database (IEDB, iedb.org) is a freely available resource that catalogs experimentally defined immune epitopes and - if available - the immune receptors that recognize them. Currently, the IEDB records [~]185, 000 T cell receptors and [~]5, 000 B cell receptors/antibodies with experimentally verified epitope specificity. Because these receptor data were manually curated from [~]3, 300 references spanning decades, nomenclature inconsistencies present challenges for computational analyses and user queries. To support integrated analysis of the entire dataset, we revised the IEDB receptor data standardization and validation pipeline to flag and correct inaccuracies. Anomalous receptors from over 800 studies were flagged for re-curation. The updated receptor dataset shows greater conformity through consistent gene nomenclature formatting and harmonized CDR sequence delimitation. Taking advantage of the increased receptor data consistency, the IEDB web interface was expanded to include receptor search features directly on the homepage, support V/J gene and species options in the refined receptor search, and allow direct data export in the Adaptive Immune Receptor Repertoire (AIRR) format. We anticipate that the improved receptor data quality will simplify bioinformatics analyses, and facilitate integration of IEDB data into cross-repository data resources, such as the AIRR Knowledge Commons.

bioinformatics↗

bioRxiv2026

IMMREP25: Unseen Peptides

T cell receptors (TCRs) can bind to peptides presented by MHC molecules (pMHC) as a first step to trigger a T cell response. Reliable approaches to predict TCR:pMHC binding would have broad applications in clinical diagnostics, therapeutics, and the fundamental understanding of molecular interactions. IMMREP is a community organized series of prediction contests that asks participants to predict TCR:pMHC binding on unpublished datasets. Previous iterations in 2022 and 2023 showed multiple approaches can predict TCR-pMHC binding with significant accuracy (median AUC_0.1[≥]0.7) for peptides where experimental data is available ("seen" peptides). In contrast, models did not outperform random guessing for peptides that have no such data available ("unseen" peptides). Here we report on the results of IMMREP25, which focused solely on unseen peptides in order to evaluate the cutting edge of the field. We received 126 named submissions predicting the specificity of 1,000 TCRs against twenty unseen peptides restricted by one of two MHC molecules (HLA-A*02:01 and HLA-B*40:01). The best performing methods showed a macro-AUC_0.1 of 0.60, significantly better than random, demonstrating significant advances in the field. The top performing methods incorporated structural modeling into their approach, indicating that especially for unseen peptides, a structural understanding aids in the prediction of TCR:pMHC interactions. The results from this benchmark highlight the significant challenges remaining for TCR:pMHC predictions and will inform future method development.

bioinformatics↗

bioRxiv2025

NetTCR-struc, a structure driven approach for prediction of TCR-pMHC interactions

Accurate modeling of T cell receptor (TCR)-peptide-major histocompatibility complex (pMHC) interactions is critical for understanding immune recognition. In this study, we present advances in structural modeling of TCR-pMHC class I complexes focusing on improving docking quality scoring and structural model selection using graph neural networks (GNN). We find that AlphaFold-Multimers confidence score in certain cases correlates poorly with DockQ quality scores, leading to overestimation of model accuracy. Our proposed GNN solution achieves a 25% increase in Spearmans correlation between predicted quality and DockQ (from 0.681 to 0.855) and improves docking candidate ranking. Additionally, the GNN completely avoids selection of failed structures. Additionally, we assess the ability of our models to distinguish binding from non-binding TCR-pMHC interactions based on their predicted quality. Here, we demonstrate that our proposed model, particularly for high-quality structural models, is capable of discriminating between binding and non-binding complexes in a zero-shot setting. However, our findings also underlined that the structural pipeline struggled to generate sufficiently accurate TCR-pMHC models for reliable binding classification, highlighting the need for further improvements in modeling accuracy.

bioinformatics↗