Mayo Clinic Vaccine Research Group, Mayo Clinic, Guggenheim Building 611C, 200 First Street SW, Rochester, MN, 55905, USA.
Sci Rep. 2020 Aug 25;10(1):14179. doi: 10.1038/s41598-020-70864-8.
A novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) emerged from China in late 2019 and rapidly spread across the globe, infecting millions of people and generating societal disruption on a level not seen since the 1918 influenza pandemic. A safe and effective vaccine is desperately needed to prevent the continued spread of SARS-CoV-2; yet, rational vaccine design efforts are currently hampered by the lack of knowledge regarding viral epitopes targeted during an immune response, and the need for more in-depth knowledge on betacoronavirus immunology. To that end, we developed a computational workflow using a series of open-source algorithms and webtools to analyze the proteome of SARS-CoV-2 and identify putative T cell and B cell epitopes. Utilizing a set of stringent selection criteria to filter peptide epitopes, we identified 41 T cell epitopes (5 HLA class I, 36 HLA class II) and 6 B cell epitopes that could serve as promising targets for peptide-based vaccine development against this emerging global pathogen. To our knowledge, this is the first study to comprehensively analyze all 10 (structural, non-structural and accessory) proteins from SARS-CoV-2 using predictive algorithms to identify potential targets for vaccine development.
一种新型冠状病毒（SARS-CoV-2）于 2019 年末在中国出现，并迅速在全球范围内传播，感染了数百万人，并造成了自 1918 年流感大流行以来从未有过的社会混乱。迫切需要安全有效的疫苗来防止 SARS-CoV-2 的持续传播；然而，由于缺乏针对免疫反应中靶向的病毒表位的知识，以及对β冠状病毒免疫学的更深入了解，合理的疫苗设计工作目前受到阻碍。为此，我们开发了一种使用一系列开源算法和网络工具的计算工作流程，用于分析 SARS-CoV-2 的蛋白质组并识别潜在的 T 细胞和 B 细胞表位。利用一组严格的选择标准来筛选肽表位，我们确定了 41 个 T 细胞表位（5 个 HLA Ⅰ类，36 个 HLA Ⅱ类）和 6 个 B 细胞表位，它们可能成为针对这种新兴全球病原体的基于肽的疫苗开发的有前途的目标。据我们所知，这是第一项使用预测算法全面分析 SARS-CoV-2 的所有 10 种（结构、非结构和辅助）蛋白以识别疫苗开发潜在目标的研究。
