Evidence map›Paper›PMID 42289978›Full record

ArticleBioinformatics (Oxford, England)2026

PMGen: from peptide-MHC structure prediction to peptide generation.

Amir H Asgary, Amirreza Aleyasin, Jonas A Mehl, Salman S Fallah, Hasmig Aintablian, Burkhard Ludewig, Michele Mishto, Juliane Liepe, Johannes Söding

Abstract read
In one paragraph

Article in Bioinformatics (Oxford, England), 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 1 paper.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
1citing papers in PubMed
–field-weighted citation impact
1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

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3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

1 citing paper in PubMed.

  1. Article
4 · The record

Corrections and comments

PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

9 authors.

Amir H AsgaryQuantitative and Computational Biology Group, Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences, Göttingen 37077, Germany.ORCID 0009-0000-4409-6807
Amirreza AleyasinQuantitative and Computational Biology Group, Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences, Göttingen 37077, Germany.
Jonas A MehlQuantitative and Computational Biology Group, Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences, Göttingen 37077, Germany.
Salman S FallahQuantitative and Computational Biology Group, Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences, Göttingen 37077, Germany.
Hasmig AintablianQuantitative and Computational Biology Group, Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences, Göttingen 37077, Germany.
Burkhard LudewigInstitute of Immunobiology, Kantonsspital St. Gallen, St. Gallen 9007, Switzerland.
Michele MishtoCentre for Inflammation Biology and Cancer Immunology (CIBCI) & Peter Gorer Department of Immunobiology, King's College London, London SE1 1UL, United Kingdom.
Juliane LiepeMax Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences, Göttingen 37077, Germany.
Johannes SödingQuantitative and Computational Biology Group, Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences, Göttingen 37077, Germany.ORCID 0000-0001-9642-8244

Funding

Cancer Research UK C67500/A29686CRUK City of London Centre CTRQQR-2021/100004European Research Council 945528MPI-NAT CollaborationSwiss National Science Foundation 10000830the Max Planck Society
6 · The paper itself

Abstract

motivationAccurate structural modeling of peptide-major histocompatibility complex (pMHC) complexes is essential for structure-driven immunotherapy design, yet current prediction tools suffer from narrow class coverage, restricted peptide lengths, insufficient accuracy, and a lack of built-in structure-aware peptide sampling. Consequently, most mimotope and altered peptide ligand designs rely solely on sequence substitution, leaving spatial and biophysical insights from pMHC structures largely unexploited.

resultsWe introduce peptide-MHC generator (PMGen), an integrated framework for structure prediction and structure-guided design of variable-length peptides across MHC Class I and II. PMGen enforces anchor constraints within AlphaFold2 through two complementary strategies, initial guess and template engineering, achieving state-of-the-art structural fidelity without model fine-tuning. On a comprehensive benchmark, PMGen outperforms all existing methods, yielding median peptide-core Cα RMSDs of 0.62 Å for MHC-I and 0.33 Å for MHC-II. We show that PMGen can recover incorrectly predicted anchor positions and that AlphaFold pLDDT scores enable sequence-independent binding-core identification. Applied to a published neoantigen/wild-type pair, PMGen accurately captures mutation-induced conformational changes. Beyond structure prediction, we show that ProteinMPNN sampling on PMGen-predicted backbones yields higher affinity peptides while preserving the parental 3D conformation. Using PMGen to generate 63 817 high-confidence pMHC structures as training data, we further improve ProteinMPNN's peptide sequence recovery from 0.14 to 0.64 on a test set of 85 unseen MHC-I alleles, highlighting the value of accurate predicted structures for downstream machine learning tasks. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: PMGen is freely available at https://github.com/soedinglab/PMGen, with an interactive Colab notebook at https://colab.research.google.com/github/soedinglab/PMGen/blob/master/colab.ipynb.

Indexed as

Computational BiologyMajor Histocompatibility ComplexPeptidesSoftwareImmunoinformaticsModels, MolecularPrediction AlgorithmsProtein ConformationPeptides

Identifiers

PMID42289978
PMCPMC13308714

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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.