In-Silico Design of Envelope based Multi-epitope Vaccine Candidate Against Kyasanur Forest Disease Virus

Abstract

Kyasanur Forest Disease Virus (KFDV) causing common tick-borne hemorrhagic fever in south India, there is no approved anti-viral or efficacious vaccine against this disease. Recent KFDV spread into new geographic locations gives urgent call for development of new vaccine and drugs. In this study, we adapted in-silico approach to design multi-epitope subunit vaccine for KFDV. Conserved regions of KFDV envelope protein sequences reported during 1962 to 2016 were identified. Eight different immuno-informatics tools were employed to predict the linear B-cell and T-cell epitopes, high scored and/or multi-immunogenic epitopes were linked together and obtained two vaccine candidates (VC1 and VC2). Obtained vaccine candidates were found to be non-allergic and had good antigenic properties, also gives the cross-protection against to Alkhurma Hemorrhagic Fever virus (AHFV). The 3D structures of vaccine candidates were built and validated. Docking of vaccine candidates with toll-like receptor-8 (TLR-8) was performed by Hex 8.0 and Cluspro, highest binding energy observed between VC2 and TLR8. JCAT sever confirmed cloning efficiency of both vaccine constructs and in-silico cloning into pET30a (+) vector by SnapGene suggests successful translation of vaccine constructs. In this study, multi-epitope vaccine candidates were designed and validated, it paves the way for up-coming vaccine and diagnostic kit development.

Design of a Multi-epitope Vaccine Against Acinetobacter baumannii Using Immunoinformatics Approach

“…The rho-independent transcription terminators, prokaryotic ribosome binding sites, and cleavage sites of some restriction enzymes were avoided during the operation performed by JCAT server (Grote et al 2005 ). In addition, to clone the adapted gene sequence of the final vaccine construct (V3) in E. coli pET28a vector (Ali et al 2021 ), using Snapgene tool at https://www.snapgene.com/ to ensure the vaccine construct expression (Arumugam 2021 ) and BglII and ApaI restriction sites were introduced to the N and C-terminals of the sequence, respectively.…”