Department of Biosciences, Biotechnologies and Pharmacological Sciences, University of Bari, Bari, Italy.
Immunopharmacol Immunotoxicol. 2013 Feb;35(1):64-70. doi: 10.3109/08923973.2012.736521. Epub 2012 Nov 2.
West Nile virus (WNV) infection may be associated with fever, neurologic disorders, and acute flaccid paralysis as a final clinical outcome. In spite of the numerous WNV infection outbreaks in Africa, Eurasia, Australia, and North America and notwithstanding an intense research effort for developing effective anti-WNV vaccines, currently no immunopreventive or therapeutic approaches are available. Moreover, antigenic cross-reactivity among flaviviruses can make difficult WNV serodiagnosis. Here we analyze the primary sequence of WNV polyprotein searching for peptide modules that might be utilized to design targeted diagnostic tools and anti-WNV vaccines for use in humans. To this aim, we applied the low-similarity hypothesis, according to which rare peptide sequences are more likely immunogenic than frequent peptide sequences. We report on a set of peptide sequences unique to the WNV, the immunogenic potential of which appears to be confirmed by immunological data cataloged at the Immune Epitope Data Base resource.
西尼罗河病毒（WNV）感染可能与发热、神经紊乱和急性弛缓性麻痹有关，是最终的临床结局。尽管在非洲、欧亚大陆、澳大利亚和北美洲有许多WNV 感染爆发，尽管有大量研究努力开发有效的抗 WNV 疫苗，但目前还没有免疫预防或治疗方法。此外，黄病毒之间的抗原交叉反应使得 WNV 的血清学诊断变得困难。在这里，我们分析了 WNV 多蛋白的一级序列，寻找可能用于设计针对人类的靶向诊断工具和抗 WNV 疫苗的肽模块。为此，我们应用了低相似性假设，根据该假设，稀有肽序列比常见肽序列更有可能具有免疫原性。我们报告了一组WNV 特有的肽序列，其免疫原性似乎得到了免疫表位数据库资源中编目的免疫学数据的证实。
