Designing multiepitope subunit vaccine for Mycobacterium tuberculosis: Immunoinformatic approach
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Date
2020
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
International Journal of Infectious Diseases
Abstract
Background: Tuberculosis is the most common cause of death
among adults in the most economically age groups and immunecompromised
patients. Increase in transmission of Mycobacterium
tuberculosis strains with drug resistance has complicated tuberculosis
control and continue to pose a challenge to global public
health. Mycobacterium tuberculosis has recently proved to stimulate
strong humoral immunity against adhesin such as hsp70. Vaccination
is an effective means of protection and prevention of spread of
vaccinable preventable diseases. Bacillus Calmette–Guérin vaccine
is the currently the only vaccine used to protect against tuberculosis,
hence the need to design more effective vaccines that will
protect adults and immunocompromised patients.
Methods and materials: Proteins used in this study were
retrieved from the NCBI database. The tools used for the design of
the vaccine include AntigenPro server for antigenicity prediction,
NETCTL server for CTL epitopes, and IEDB server for HTL epitopes.
AAY and GPGPG were used to link both suitable CTL and HTL epitopes
respectively while EAAK was used as adjuvants. Protparam
server was used to compute the physiochemical parameters of
vaccine construct. Allergenicity was predicted using Allertop v2.0.
Vaccine 3D model and tertiary structure was predicted using RaptorX
server and later refined using the Galaxyrefine server.
Results: The proteins used for the vaccine construct were found
to be antigenic as predicted by ANTIGENpro having a score of ≥0.8.
A final vaccine construct of 447 amino acids residues was designed
using 20 CTL and 10 HTL epitopes. The allergenicity test showed the
vaccine protein is non-allergenic in nature and safe for human use.
The instability index and aliphatic index were given to be 27.76 and
83.53 respectively which classifies the protein to be thermostable.
The estimated half life in mammalian reticulocytes was given as
4.4 h in-vitro.
Conclusion: The designed vaccine construct is stable, immunogenic
with high antigenic properties, non allergenic in nature and
safe for human use. Designing multiepitope subunit vaccine using
Immunoinformatics approach shows that it is feasible to produce
effective vaccines against tuberculosis and save millions of lives
from being lost every year.
Description
Staff Publication