Comprehensive mapping of the antigenic peptide repertoire during bacterial infection

Antibacterial vaccines are increasingly recognized as highly effective tools to mitigate antibiotics resistance. For the rational design of novel vaccines, knowledge about the identity of antigenic bacterial peptides presented on infected cells is essential, however, this is information is incomplete or lacking for many bacteria. Hence, this project aims to i) establish a workflow for the identification of bacterial antigenic peptides presented on infected cells by mass spectrometry (MS) and ii) map the repertoire of peptides presented during bacterial infection with Listeria and Salmonella, two major types of human-pathogenic model bacteria. The project focuses on harvesting and enriching peptides presented on host cells by MHC class I followed by MS-based peptide detection. Finally, bioinformatic tools like MaxQuant and de novo sequencing algorithms will aid in peptide sequence identification