A reverse vaccinology and immunoinformatics approach for designing a multiepitope vaccine against SARS-CoV-2.

Content Provider	Europe PMC
Author	Jahangirian, Ehsan Jamal, Ghadir A. Nouroozi, MohammadReza Mohammadpour, Alemeh
Abstract	Since 2019, the world was involved with SARS-CoV-2 and consequently, with the announcement by the World Health Organization that COVID-19 was a pandemic, scientific were an effort to obtain the best approach to combat this global dilemma. The best way to prevent the pandemic from spreading further is to use a vaccine against COVID-19. Here, we report the design of a recombinant multi-epitope vaccine against the four proteins spike or crown (S), membrane (M), nucleocapsid (N), and envelope (E) of SARS-CoV-2 using immunoinformatics tools. We evaluated the most antigenic epitopes that bind to HLA class 1 subtypes, along with HLA class 2, as well as B cell epitopes. Beta-defensin 3 and PADRE sequence were used as adjuvants in the structure of the vaccine. KK, GPGPG, and AAY linkers were used to fuse the selected epitopes. The nucleotide sequence was cloned into pET26b(+) vector using restriction enzymes XhoI and NdeI, and HisTag sequence was considered in the C-terminal of the construct. The results showed that the proposed candidate vaccine is a 70.87 kDa protein with high antigenicity and immunogenicity as well as non-allergenic and non-toxic. A total of 95% of the selected epitopes have conservancy with similar sequences. Molecular docking showed a strong binding between the vaccine structure and tool-like receptor (TLR) 7/8. The docking, molecular dynamics, and MM/PBSA analysis showed that the vaccine established a stable interaction with both structures of TLR7 and TLR8. Simulation of immune stimulation by this vaccine showed that it evokes immune responses related to humoral and cellular immunity.Supplementary InformationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s00251-021-01228-3.
Related Links	https://europepmc.org/backend/ptpmcrender.fcgi?accid=PMC8450176&blobtype=pdf
ISSN	00937711
Journal	Immunogenetics
Volume Number	73
DOI	10.1007/s00251-021-01228-3
PubMed Central reference number	PMC8450176
Issue Number	6
PubMed reference number	34542663
e-ISSN	14321211
Language	English
Publisher	Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Publisher Date	2021-09-20
Publisher Place	Berlin/Heidelberg
Access Restriction	Open
Rights License	This article is made available via the PMC Open Access Subset for unrestricted research re-use and secondary analysis in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for the duration of the World Health Organization (WHO) declaration of COVID-19 as a global pandemic. © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2021
Subject Keyword	COVID-19 Immunoinformatics Molecular dynamics simulations Multi-epitope vaccine
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article
Subject	Genetics Immunology