- Zdinak, Paul;
- Trivedi, Nishtha;
- Grebinoski, Stephanie;
- Torrey, Jessica;
- Martinez, Eduardo;
- Martinez, Salome;
- Hicks, Louise;
- Ranjan, Rashi;
- Makani, Venkata;
- Roland, Mary;
- Kublo, Lyubov;
- Arshad, Sanya;
- Vignali, Dario;
- Joglekar, Alok;
- Anderson, Mark
CD4+ T cells recognize peptide antigens presented on class II major histocompatibility complex (MHC-II) molecules to carry out their function. The remarkable diversity of T cell receptor sequences and lack of antigen discovery approaches for MHC-II make profiling the specificities of CD4+ T cells challenging. We have expanded our platform of signaling and antigen-presenting bifunctional receptors to encode MHC-II molecules presenting covalently linked peptides (SABR-IIs) for CD4+ T cell antigen discovery. SABR-IIs can present epitopes to CD4+ T cells and induce signaling upon their recognition, allowing a readable output. Furthermore, the SABR-II design is modular in signaling and deployment to T cells and B cells. Here, we demonstrate that SABR-IIs libraries presenting endogenous and non-contiguous epitopes can be used for antigen discovery in the context of type 1 diabetes. SABR-II libraries provide a rapid, flexible, scalable and versatile approach for de novo identification of CD4+ T cell ligands from single-cell RNA sequencing data using experimental and computational approaches.