title: Identifying weak signals in the presence of noise: a new method of locating potential ligand contact residues in immunoglobulin-related molecules.
abstract: We develop and apply a new method for estimating the locations of hypervariable residues in immunoglobulin-related molecules. The method differs from the standard introduced by Wu and Kabat in two essential ways: (1) we take explicit account of the type of substitution at a given position, rather than just the total number of substitutions, and (2) we use an explicit statistical decision criterion for classifying a site into either the complementarity determining or framework category. Simulations indicate that the method is reliable with relatively little data, approximately 5% of the sites being misclassified when 10 sequences are aligned. The method is applied to immunoglobulin light chains and to class 1 and class 2 products of the major histocompatibility complex.
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomathematical Sciences, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York, NY 10028.
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Gex-Fabry
authors.forename: F
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Marchetti
authors.forename: K
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Nakata
authors.forename: C
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: DeLisi
mesh_terms: D005374:Filtration / Q000379:methods; D006801:Humans; D007147:Immunoglobulin Light Chains; D007135:Immunoglobulin Variable Region; D008024:Ligands; D008285:Major Histocompatibility Complex; D008954:Models, Biological; D011336:Probability; D013223:Statistics as Topic / Q000379:methods*
chemical_list: D007147:Immunoglobulin Light Chains; D007135:Immunoglobulin Variable Region; D008024:Ligands