Design of an epitope-based peptide vaccine against spike protein of human coronavirus: an in silico approach

Abstract

Human coronavirus (HCoV), a member of Coronaviridae family, is the causative agent of upper respiratory tract infections and “atypical pneumonia”. Despite severe epidemic outbreaks on several occasions and lack of antiviral drug, not much progress has been made with regard to an epitope-based vaccine designed for HCoV. In this study, a computational approach was adopted to identify a multiepitope vaccine candidate against this virus that could be suitable to trigger a significant immune response. Sequences of the spike proteins were collected from a protein database and analyzed with an in silico tool, to identify the most immunogenic protein. Both T cell immunity and B cell immunity were checked for the peptides to ensure that they had the capacity to induce both humoral and cell-mediated immunity. The peptide sequence from 88–94 amino acids and the sequence KSSTGFVYF were found as the most potential B cell and T cell epitopes, respectively. Furthermore, conservancy analysis was also done using in silico tools and showed a conservancy of 64.29% for all epitopes. The peptide sequence could interact with as many as 16 human leukocyte antigens (HLAs) and showed high cumulative population coverage, ranging from 75.68% to 90.73%. The epitope was further tested for binding against the HLA molecules, using in silico docking techniques, to verify the binding cleft epitope interaction. The allergenicity of the epitopes was also evaluated. This computational study of design of an epitope-based peptide vaccine against HCoVs allows us to determine novel peptide antigen targets in spike proteins on intuitive grounds, albeit the preliminary results thereof require validation by in vitro and in vivo experiments.

Immunoinformatic prediction about potential novel vaccine in surface antigen fragment protein of Toxoplasma gondii

“…As our proposed epitope is shown to be 100% conserved among examined toxoplasma surface antigen proteins, we suggest that it will be a good possible candidate for vaccine designing. Epitope-based vaccine designing is now becoming more popular and already has been established for rhinovirus (Lapelosa et al 2009), dengue virus (Chakraborty et al 2010), human corona virus (Oany et al 2014), and some others. This type of work has also been proven in vitro (Khan et al 2014).…”

Japanese encephalitis virus: A multi-epitope loaded peptide vaccine formulation using reverse vaccinology approach

“…Human coronavirus (HCoV) has been reported to cause pneumonia as well as some diseases of the respiratory and the gastrointestinal tracts in human. For developing peptide vaccines against this virus, Oany et al (2014) identified the epitopes in spike proteins that was suggested for boosting immunological response within human body against HCoV. From the study, it was evident that the B-cell epitope positioned at 88-94 amino acids and the T-cell epitope KSSTGFVYF had the ability for designing a peptide vaccine (Oany et al, 2014).…”

Immunogenicity Prediction by VaxiJen: A Ten Year Overview

“…56 outer membrane spike protein sequences from different variants belonging to five types (229E, NL63, HKU1, EMC, and OC43) were retrieved from UniProtKB and assessed for antigenicity using VaxiJen [107]. The spike protein (UniprotKB id: B2KKT9) with the highest VaxiJen score was searched for B-and T-cell epitopes, identifying two peptide sequences as conserved and promiscuous.…”