Immunoinformatics-guided designing of epitope-based subunit vaccines against the SARS Coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2)

Abstract

SARS Coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic has become a global issue which has raised the concern of scientific community to design and discover a countermeasure against this deadly virus. So far, the pandemic has caused the death of hundreds of thousands of people upon infection and spreading. To date, no effective vaccine is available which can combat the infection caused by this virus. Therefore, this study was conducted to design possible epitope-based subunit vaccines against the SARS-CoV-2 virus using the approaches of reverse vaccinology and immunoinformatics. Upon continual computational experimentation, three possible vaccine constructs were designed and one vaccine construct was selected as the best vaccine based on molecular docking study which is supposed to effectively act against the SARS-CoV-2. Thereafter, the molecular dynamics simulation and in silico codon adaptation experiments were carried out in order to check biological stability and find effective mass production strategy of the selected vaccine. This study should contribute to uphold the present efforts of the researches to secure a definitive preventative measure against this lethal disease.

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

“…In this study, an effective subunit vaccine was designed against various isolates of SARS-CoV-2 from different countries around the world, utilizing the immunoinformatics approach. In immunoinformatics, the novel antigens of a pathogen or virus are identified by dissecting its genomic data and then different tools of in silico biology are used for vaccine development by analyzing its genome ( Chong & Khan, 2019 ; Rappuoli, 2000 ; Sarkar et al, 2020a ). In our study, a blueprint of epitope-based vaccine was designed which might produce substantial immune response towards SARS-CoV-2, isolated from different countries around the world, targeting the spike glycoprotein, nucleocapsid phosphoprotein, membrane glycoprotein, and envelope protein of the virus.…”

A multiple peptides vaccine against COVID-19 designed from the nucleocapsid phosphoprotein (N) and Spike Glycoprotein (S) via the immunoinformatics approach

“…Also, M. Bhattacharya et al [ 16 ] used the Spike glycoprotein and P. Kalita et al [ 20 ] used the Spike glycoprotein (S), Membrane glycoprotein (M), and Nucleocapsid protein (N) to design a subunit vaccine. Besides the previous three proteins, B. Sarkar et al [ 18 ] used ORF3a protein to design a subunit vaccine. Since we did not include the two alleles HLA-A*11:01, HLA-A*68:01 in our study and did not design a subunit vaccine, the logical comparison will not be applied.…”

“…The peptide vaccines are sufficient to stimulate cellular and humoral immunity without allergic responses [ 12 ]. They are” safe, simply produced, stable, reproducible, cost-effective” [ 13 ], and permit a broad spectrum of immunity [ 12 ]; consequently, they are the targets for this study as well as being utilized in multiple studies concerning the COVID-19 vaccine [ [14] , [15] , [16] , [17] , [18] , [19] , [20] ].…”

Design and optimization of a subunit vaccine targeting COVID-19 molecular shreds using an immunoinformatics framework

“…64 The epitopes were engineered and combined using various links and motifs, which also helped to maintain the conformation and exibility of the vaccine construct. 65 The vaccine construct was also adjoined with adjuvants to enhance the immunogenicity values of the vaccine. Adjuvants cholera toxin subunit-B (CTB) and tetanus toxin fragment fragment-C (TTFrC) were adjoined to the vaccine construct in order to evoke robust immune responses.…”