Jain Richa, Jain Ankit, Verma Santosh Kumar
Institute of Engineering and Technology, Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh India.
Indian Meteorological Department, Lucknow, India.
Int J Pept Res Ther. 2021;27(3):1729-1740. doi: 10.1007/s10989-021-10205-z. Epub 2021 Apr 16.
COVID-19 is an infectious disease caused by a newly discovered corona virus SARS-COV-2. It is the most dangerous epidemic existing currently all over the world. To date, there is no licensed vaccine and not any particular efficient therapeutic agent available to prevent or cure the disease. So development of an effective vaccine is the urgent need of the time. The proposed study aims to identify potential vaccine candidates by screening the complete proteome of SARS-COV-2 using the computational approach. From 14 protein entries in UniProtKB, 4 proteins were screened for epitope prediction based on consensus antigenicity predictions and various physico-chemical criteria like transmembrane domain, allergenicity, GRAVY value, toxicity, stability index. Comprehensive analysis of these 4 antigens revealed that spike protein (P0DTC2) and nucleoprotein (P0DTC9) show the greatest potential for experimental immunogenicity analysis. These 2 proteins have several potential CD4+ and CD8+ T-cell epitopes, as well as high probability of B-cell epitope regions as compared to well-characterized antigen the matrix protein 1 [Influenza A virus (H5N1)]. In addition, the epitope SIIAYTMSL predicted from spike protein (P0DTC2) and epitope SPRWYFYYL predicted from nucleoprotein (P0DTC9) exhibited more than 60% population coverage in the target populations Europe, North America, South Asia, Northeast Asia taken in this study. These epitopes have also been found to exhibit highly significant TCR-pMHC interactions having a joint Z value of 4.51 and 4.37 respectively. Therefore, this analysis suggests that the predicted epitopes might be suitable vaccine candidates and should be subjected to further in-vivo and in-vitro studies.
新型冠状病毒肺炎（COVID-19）是一种由新发现的冠状病毒SARS-CoV-2引起的传染病。它是目前全球存在的最危险的流行病。迄今为止，尚无获批的疫苗，也没有任何特别有效的治疗药物可用于预防或治愈该疾病。因此，开发一种有效的疫苗是当务之急。本研究旨在通过计算方法筛选SARS-CoV-2的完整蛋白质组，以确定潜在的疫苗候选物。从UniProtKB中的14个蛋白质条目中，根据一致性抗原性预测以及各种物理化学标准（如跨膜结构域、致敏性、亲水性/疏水性值、毒性、稳定性指数）筛选了4种蛋白质进行表位预测。对这4种抗原的综合分析表明，刺突蛋白（P0DTC2）和核蛋白（P0DTC9）在实验性免疫原性分析中显示出最大潜力。与特征明确的甲型流感病毒（H5N1）基质蛋白1抗原相比，这2种蛋白质有几个潜在的CD4+和CD8+T细胞表位，以及较高概率的B细胞表位区域。此外，从刺突蛋白（P0DTC2）预测的表位SIIAYTMSL和从核蛋白（P0DTC9）预测的表位SPRWYFYYL在本研究纳入的欧洲、北美、南亚、东北亚目标人群中表现出超过60%的人群覆盖率。这些表位还被发现分别具有高度显著的TCR-pMHC相互作用，联合Z值分别为4.51和4.37。因此，该分析表明，预测的表位可能是合适的疫苗候选物，应进行进一步的体内和体外研究。
