Importantly, we note that the mutation of amino acid residues at MHC anchor positions (i.e. the second residue and last residue of each 9mer epitope) tends to result in more dramatic predicted binding affinity differences between the tumor and paired normal peptides compared to mutation of non-anchor residues (median of 2935.1 nM vs. 28.1 nM, respectively; p < 2.2 × 10− 16; see Additional file 1: Figure S5). Here, HLA-C is linked to neoplasm.