Immuno‐informatics: Mining genomes for vaccine components

Abstract

SummaryThe complete genome sequences of more than 60 microbes have been completed in the past decade. Concurrently, a series of new informatics tools, designed to harness this new wealth of information, have been developed. Some of these new tools allow researchers to select regions of microbial genomes that trigger immune responses. These regions, termed epitopes, are ideal components of vaccines. When the new tools are used to search for epitopes, this search is usually coupled with in vitro screening methods; an approach that has been termed computational immunology or immuno-informatics. Researchers are now implementing these combined methods to scan genomic sequences for vaccine components. They are thereby expanding the number of different proteins that can be screened for vaccine development, while narrowing this search to those regions of the proteins that are extremely likely to induce an immune response. As the tools improve, it may soon be feasible to skip over many of the in vitro screening steps, moving directly from genome sequence to vaccine design. The present article reviews the work of several groups engaged in the development of immuno-informatics tools and illustrates the application of these tools to the process of vaccine discovery.

Advances in FIV vaccine technology

“…Developing databases for viral peptides and the binding pockets of feline MHC-I and -II in the context of efficacy trials should provide a computational approach for the development of T-cell based vaccines as well as T-helper based antibody vaccines (Fig 4). Computerized assessment of human MHC-I and -II binding sites on sequences of interest is available through website databases (De Groot et al, 2002;De Groot and Berzofsky, 2004). However, such databases for feline MHC-peptide binding sites have not yet been developed.…”

Computational modeling and analysis of prominent T-cell epitopes for assisting in designing vaccine of ZIKA virus

“…In order to design a potent synthetic peptide vaccine candidate, In Silico modeling techniques and immunoinformatics approaches have been applied including the use of bioinformatics software and tools which are based on various machine learning programs and other statistical approaches. The active candidate for vaccine must possess antigenicity and it must be responsible for pathogenicity (De Groot et al, 2002;Verma et al, 2011) …”

Immunome-derived vaccines

“…In the hands of epitope mapping experts, these epitope prediction tools are proving to be extremely useful. Immunoinformatics methods dramatically reduce the time and effort involved in screening potential epitopes [14,15].…”