National Center for Microbiology, Instituto de Salud Carlos III Majadahonda, 28222 Majadahonda, Spain.
Department of Mathematical Sciences, Chalmers University of Technology, 41296 Gothenburg, Sweden.
Int J Mol Sci. 2022 Mar 2;23(5):2768. doi: 10.3390/ijms23052768.
CMV is a major cause of morbidity and mortality in immunocompromised individuals that will benefit from the availability of a vaccine. Despite the efforts made during the last decade, no CMV vaccine is available. An ideal CMV vaccine should elicit a broad immune response against multiple viral antigens including proteins involved in virus-cell interaction and entry. However, the therapeutic use of neutralizing antibodies targeting glycoproteins involved in viral entry achieved only partial protection against infection. In this scenario, a better understanding of the CMV proteome potentially involved in viral entry may provide novel candidates to include in new potential vaccine design. In this study, we aimed to explore the CMV genome to identify proteins with putative transmembrane domains to identify new potential viral envelope proteins. We have performed in silico analysis using the genome sequences of nine different CMV strains to predict the transmembrane domains of the encoded proteins. We have identified 77 proteins with transmembrane domains, 39 of which were present in all the strains and were highly conserved. Among the core proteins, 17 of them such as UL10, UL139 or US33A have no ascribed function and may be good candidates for further mechanistic studies.
巨细胞病毒（CMV）是免疫功能低下个体发病和死亡的主要原因，此类人群将从疫苗的应用中获益。尽管在过去十年中付出了努力，但目前仍没有 CMV 疫苗可用。理想的 CMV 疫苗应能诱导针对多种病毒抗原的广泛免疫应答，包括参与病毒-细胞相互作用和进入的蛋白。然而，针对参与病毒进入的糖蛋白的中和抗体的治疗用途仅能实现对感染的部分保护。在这种情况下，更好地了解可能参与病毒进入的 CMV 蛋白质组可能为新的潜在疫苗设计提供新的候选物。在这项研究中，我们旨在探索 CMV 基因组，以鉴定具有潜在跨膜结构域的蛋白，从而识别新的潜在病毒包膜蛋白。我们使用九种不同 CMV 毒株的基因组序列进行了计算机分析，以预测编码蛋白的跨膜结构域。我们鉴定出 77 种具有跨膜结构域的蛋白，其中 39 种存在于所有毒株中，且高度保守。在核心蛋白中，其中 17 种如 UL10、UL139 或 US33A 没有赋予功能，可能是进一步进行机制研究的良好候选物。
