INSTRUCTIONS

INPUT DATA

In this section, the user must define the input for the prediction server following these steps:

1) Specify the desired type of input data (FASTA or PEPTIDE ) using the drop down menu.

2) Provide the input data by means of pasting the data into the blank field, uploading it using the "Choose File" button or by loading sample data using the "Load Data" button. All the input sequences must be in one-letter amino acid code. The alphabet is as follows (case sensitive):

A C D E F G H I K L M N P Q R S T V W Y and X (unknown)

Any other symbol will be converted to X before processing. At most 5000 sequences are allowed per submission; each sequence must be not more than 20,000 amino acids long and not less than 9 amino acids long.

3) If FASTA was selected as input type, the user must select the peptide length(s) the prediction server is going to work with. NetMHCIIpan-4.0 will "chop" the input FASTA sequence in overlapping peptides of the provided length and will predict binding against all of them. By default input proteins are digested into 15-mer peptides. Note that, if PEPTIDE was selected as input type, this step is unnecessary and thus the peptide length selector will directly not appear in the interface.

4)Context encoding informs the network of the proteolytic context the ligand. Context is automatically generated from the source protein if the user selects FASTA format. Briefly, context is made up of 12 amino acids: 3 amino acids upstream of the ligand, 3 first amino acids at the ligand N-terminus, 3 last amino acids at the ligand C-terminus and 3 amino acids downstream the ligand(in the source protein), all concatenated together. If the input type is PEPTIDE , the user must specify the ligand context(see PEPTIDECONT ).

Input





MHC SELECTION

In this section, the user must define which MHC molecule(s) the input data is going to be predicted against:

1) Here the user can select from a list of MHC molecules by first selecting the species/loci and clicking MHCs in the list. Note that for DP and DQ alleles, both ALPHA and BETA chains must be selected.

2) The user can also type the molecule names. Note, that for HLA-DP and HLA-DQ alleles, ALPHA and BETA chains must both be typed. Please consult List of MHC molecule names. Note that molecules selected from step 1. populate this bar.

3) If the molecule of interest is not provided in the lists, the user can input ALPHA and BETA sequences in fasta format(for HLA-DR, only the BETA chain is needed). With this option, rank score predictions are not available.
MHCSelection


ADDITIONAL CONFIGURATION

In this section, the user may define additional parameters to further customize the run:

1) Specify thresholds for strong and weak binders. They are expressed in terms of %Rank, that is percentile of the predicted binding affinity compared to the distribution of affinities calculated on set of random natural peptides. The peptide will be identified as a strong binder if it is found among the top x% predicted peptides, where x% is the specified threshold for strong binders (by default 2%). The peptide will be identified as a weak binder if the % Rank is above the threshold of the strong binders but below the specified threshold for the weak binders (by default 10%).

2) Tick this option to include also Binding Affinity predictions together with Eluted Ligand likelihood.

3) Tick this option to output only peptides with a % Rank score below a specified threshold. Useful for large submissions.

4) Tick this box to output only the strongest binding core.

5) Tick this box to have the output sorted by descending prediction score.

6) Enable this option to export the prediction output to .XLS format (readable for most spreadsheet softwares, like Microsoft Excel).
MHCSelection





SUBMISSION

After the user has finished the "INPUT DATA", "MHC SELECTION" and "ADDITIONAL CONFIGURATION" steps, the submission can now be done. To do so, the user can click on "Submit" to submit the job to the processing server, or click on "Clear fields" to clear the page and start over.

The status of your job (either 'queued' or 'running') will be displayed and constantly updated until it terminates and the server output appears in the browser window.

After the server has finished running the corresponding predictions, an output page will be delivered to the user. A description of the output format can be found at outpur format

At any time during the wait you may enter your e-mail address and simply leave the window. Your job will continue; when it terminates you will be notified by e-mail with a URL to your results. They will be stored on the server for 24 hours.
OutputFormat