Immunoinformatics Approach to Design T-cell Epitope-Based Vaccine Against Hendra Virus

Abstract

Screening of HLA class II epitope-based peptides as potential vaccine candidates is one of the most rational approach for vaccine development against Hendra virus (HeV) infection, for which currently there is no successful vaccine in practice. In this study, screening of epitopes from HeV proteins viz matrix, glycoprotein, nucleocapsid, fusion, C protein, V protein, W protein and polymerase, followed by highest binding affinity & molecular dynamic simulation of selected T-cell epitopes with their corresponding HLA class II alleles has been done. The server ProPred facilitates the binding prediction of HLA class II allele specific epitopes from the antigenic protein sequences of HeV. PEPstrMOD server was used for PDB structure modeling of the screened epitopes and MODELLER was used for HLA alleles modeling. We docked the selected T-cell epitopes with their corresponding HLA allele structures using the AutoDock 4.2 tool. Further the selected docked complex structures were optimized by NAnoscale Molecular Dynamics program (NAMD) at 5 ps, with the CHARMM-22 force field parameter incorporated in Visual Molecular Dynamics (VMD 1.9.2) and complex structure stability was evaluated by calculating RMSD values. Epitopes IRIFVPATN (Nucleocapsid), MRNLLSQSL (Nucleocapsid), VRRAGKYYS (Matrix) and VRLKCLLCG (Fusion) proteins have shown considerable binding with DRB1*0806, DRB1*1304, DRB1*0701 and DRB1*0301 HLA class II allele respectively. Toxicity, antigenicity and population coverage of epitopes IRIFVPATN, MRNLLSQSL, VRRAGKYYS and VRLKCLLCG were analyzed by Toxin Pred, Vexijen and IEDB tool, respectively. The potential T-cell epitopes can be utilized in designing comprehensive epitope-based vaccines and diagnostic kits against Hendra virus after further in-vivo studies.

A candidate multi-epitope vaccine against SARS-CoV-2

“…Similarly, the immunoinformatic strategy of vaccine designing has recently been applied for designing multiepitope vaccines against Pseudomonas aeruginosa 98 , Klebsiella pneumoniae 88 , Dengue 99 , Nipah virus 100 , Hendra virus 101 and Malaria 102 . In addition, similar approach has also been applied for developing vaccine against cancerous antigens 28,103 .…”

A Candidate multi-epitope vaccine against SARS-CoV-2

“…Similar strategy has recently been applied for designing multi-epitope vaccines against Pseudomonas aeruginosa [65], Klebsiella pneumoniae [66], Dengue [67], Nipah virus [68], Hendra virus [69] and Malaria [70]. In addition, similar approach has also been applied for developing vaccine against cancerous antigens [18,71].…”

Immunoinformatic approach to design a vaccine against SARS-COV-2 membrane glycoprotein

“…Similarly, the immunoinformatic approaches were developed to design vaccines against Dengue (Ali et al 2017), Hendra virus (Kamthania et al 2019), Malaria (Pandey et al 2018), Nipah virus (Ojha et al 2019), Klebsiella pneumonia (Dar et al 2019)Pseudomonas aeruginosa (Solanki et al 2019) and cancerous antigens (Chauhan et al 2019). The stimulation of host's immune cells is triggered by the epitopes of B cells and T cells in the vaccine which in turn activates the other immune cells through complex signalling and MD simulations on peptide binding in the MHC binding groove was reported [32].…”