Structure-guided T cell receptor and epitope interaction prediction

T cells are adaptive immune system cells that develop in mammalian organisms and protect against foreign pathogens. Through their receptor proteins, T cells bind to infected cells and neutralize or kill them. Determining the specificity of these receptors is of crucial medical and biological importance, as it can help reveal disease pathogenesis and aid in early disease detection. In this work, we present extensive analyses of the structural information of T cell receptors (TCRs) and show how it can be used to aid their epitope specificity prediction. We determine the structures of TCRs using the state-of-the-art protein structure prediction, AlphaFold 2 and highlight the main challenges of this approach in the context of TCRs.