Immunoinformatic Identification of Potential Epitopes.

Immunoinformatic plays a pivotal role in vaccine design and development. While traditional methods are exclusively depended on immunological experiments, they are less effective, relatively expensive, and time-consuming. However, recent advances in the field of immunoinformatics have provided innovative tools for the rational design of vaccine candidates. This approach allows the selection of immunodominant regions from the sequence of whole genome of a pathogen. The identified immunodominant region could be used to develop potential vaccine candidates that can trigger protective immune responses in the host. At present, epitope-based vaccine is an attractive concept which has been successfully trailed to develop vaccines against a number of pathogens. In this chapter, we outline the methodology and workflow of how to deploy immunoinformatics tools in order to identify immunodominant epitopes using Shigella as a model organism. The immunodominant epitopes, derived from S. flexneri 2a using this workflow, were validated using in vivo model, indicating the robustness of the outlined workflow.