Exploiting the Reverse Vaccinology Approach to Design Novel Subunit Vaccine against Ebola Virus

Abstract

Ebola virus is a highly pathogenic RNA virus that causes haemorrhagic fever in human. With very high mortality rate, Ebola virus is considered as one of the dangerous viruses in the world. Although, the Ebola outbreaks claimed many lives in the past, no satisfactory treatment or vaccine have been discovered yet to fight against Ebola. For this reason, in this study, various tools of bioinformatics and immunoinformatics were used to design possible vaccines against Zaire Ebola virus strain Mayinga-76. To construct the vaccine, three potential antigenic proteins of the virus, matrix protein VP40, envelope glycoprotein and nucleoprotein were selected against which the vaccines would be designed. The MHC class-I, MHC class-II and B-cell epitopes were determined and after robust analysis through various tools and molecular docking analysis, three vaccine candidates, designated as EV-1, EV-2 and EV-3, were constructed. Since the highly conserved epitopes were used for vaccine construction, these vaccine constructs are also expected to be effective on other strains of Ebola virus like strain Gabon-94 and Kikwit-95. Next, the molecular docking study on these vaccine constructs were analyzed by molecular docking study and EV-1 emerged as the best vaccine construct. Later, molecular dynamics simulation study revealed the good performances as well as good stability of the vaccine protein. Finally, codon adaptation and in silico cloning were conducted to design a possible plasmid (pET-19b plasmid vector was used) for large scale, industrial production of the EV-1 vaccine.

Identification of potential vaccine candidates againstSARS-CoV-2, A step forward to fight COVID-19: A Reverse Vaccinology Approach

“…However, the development and research processes of vaccines are costly and sometimes, it takes many years to develop an appropriate vaccine candidate against a pathogen. In modern times, various tools and methods of immune-informatics, bioinformatics, and reverse vaccinology are extensively used for vaccine development, which save time and cost of the vaccine development process [8,22].…”

“…Top ten MHC class-I and MHC class-II epitopes were randomly selected on the basis of their percentile scores and antigenicity scores (AS). Five random B-cell lymphocyte epitopes (BCL) were selected based on of their higher length using Bipipered linear epitope prediction method [8].…”

“…In reverse vaccinology, various tools of in silico biology are used to discover the novel antigens by studying the genetic makeup of a pathogen and the genes that could lead to good epitopes are determined. This method is a quick easy and cost-effective way to design vaccine [8]. It is a process of vaccine development where the novel antigens are identified by analyzing the genomic information of a virus or other organism.…”

Engineering a novel subunit vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 by exploring immunoinformatics approach

“…The algorithm of this server uses an alignment-free approach for determining the antigenicity of query peptides or proteins, which is solely based on auto cross covariance (ACC) transformation method. In this method, the general ACC calculations of the query peptides or proteins are made solely based on their physicochemical properties ( Doytchinova and Flower, 2007 ; Doytchinova and Flower, 2008 ; Ullah et al, 2020b ). Thereafter, various physicochemical properties of the selected antigenic protein sequences were predicted by the ExPASy’s online tool ProtParam ( https://web.expasy.org/protparam/ ), where all the parameters were also kept at their default values ( Gasteiger et al, 2005 ).…”

The Essential Facts of Wuhan Novel Coronavirus Outbreak in China and Epitope-based Vaccine Designing against COVID-19

“…alanine, valine etc. [188] [189]. Surface glycoprotein also had the highest predicted aliphatic index among the two proteins (84.67).…”