HSPVdb--the Human Short Peptide Variation Database for improved mass spectrometry-based detection of polymorphic HLA-ligands.

T cell epitopes derived from polymorphic proteins or from proteins encoded by alternative reading frames (ARFs) play an important role in (tumor) immunology. Identification of these peptides is successfully performed with mass spectrometry. In a mass spectrometry-based approach, the recorded tandem mass spectra are matched against hypothetical spectra generated from known protein sequence databases.