Immunoinformatics plays a pivotal role in vaccine design, immunodiagnostic development, and antibody production. In the past, antibody design and vaccine development depended exclusively on immunological experiments which are relatively expensive and time-consuming. However, recent advances in the field of immunological bioinformatics have provided feasible tools which can be used to lessen the time and cost required for vaccine and antibody development. This approach allows the selection of immunogenic regions from the pathogen genomes. The ideal regions could be developed as potential vaccine candidates to trigger protective immune responses in the hosts. At present, epitope-based vaccines are attractive concepts which have been successfully trailed to develop vaccines which target rapidly mutating pathogens. In this article, we provide an overview of the current progress of immunoinformatics and their applications in the vaccine design, immune system modeling and therapeutics.
In the developing world, bacillary dysentery is one of the most common communicable diarrheal infections. There are approximately 169 million cases of shigellosis reported worldwide. The disease is transmitted by a group of Gram-negative intracellular enterobacteria known as Shigella flexneri, S. sonnei, S. dysenteriae, and S. boydii. Conventional treatment regimens for Shigella have been less effective due to the development of resistant strains against antibiotics. Therefore, an effective vaccine for the long term control of Shigella transmission is urgently needed. Materials and Methods: In this study, a reverse vaccinology approach was employed to identify most conserved and immunogenic outer membrane proteins (OMPs) of S. flexneri 2a. Results: Five OMPs including fepA, ompC, nlpD_1, tolC, and nlpD_2 were identified as potential vaccine candidates. Protein-protein interactions analysis using STRING software (https:// string-db.org/) revealed that five of these OMPs may potentially interact with other intracellular proteins which are involved in beta-lactam resistance pathway. Band T-cell epitopes of the selected OMPs were predicted using BCPred as well as Propred I and Propred (http:// crdd.osdd.net/raghava/propred/), respectively. Each of these OMPs contains regions which are capable to induce Band T-cell immune responses. Conclusion: Analysis acquired from this study showed that five selected OMPs have great potential for vaccine development against S. flexneri infection. The predicted immunogenic epitopes can also be used for development of peptide vaccines or multi-epitope vaccines against human shigellosis. Reverse vaccinology is a promising strategy for the discovery of potential vaccine candidates which can be used for future vaccine development against global persistent infections.
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