Arshad Sarmad Frogh, Rehana Rehana, Saleem Muhammad Asif, Usman Muhammad, Arshad Hasan Junaid, Rizwana Rizwana, Shakeela Shakeela, Rukh Asma Shah, Khan Imran Ahmad, Hayssam M Ali, Anwar Muhammad
Department of Biochemistry and Biotechnology, Muhammad Nawaz Shareef University of Agriculture, Multan, 66000, Pakistan.
Institute of Plant Breeding & Biotechnology (IPBB), Muhammad Nawaz Shareef University of Agriculture, Multan, 66000, Pakistan.
Heliyon. 2024 Jan 10;10(2):e24186. doi: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2024.e24186. eCollection 2024 Jan 30.
The recent COVID vaccinations have successfully reduced death and severity but did not stop the transmission of viruses by the emerging SARS-CoV-2 strain. There is a need for better and long-lasting dynamic vaccines for numerous prevailing strains and the evolving SARS-CoV-2 virus, necessitating the development of broad-spectrum strains being used to stop infection by reducing the spread rate and re-infection. The spike (S) glycoprotein is one of the proteins expressed commonly in the early phases of SARS-CoV-2 infection. It has been identified as the most immunogenic protein of SARS-CoV-2.
In this study, advanced bioinformatics techniques have been exploited to design the novel multi-epitope vaccine using conserved S protein portions from widespread strains of SARS-CoV-2 to predict B cell and T cell epitopes. These epitopes were selected based on toxicity, antigenicity score and immunogenicity. Epitope combinations were used to construct the maximum potent multi-epitope construct with potential immunogenic features. EAAAK, AAY, and GPGPG were used as linkers to construct epitopes.
The developed vaccine has shown positive results. After the chimeric vaccine construct was cloned into the PET28a (+) vector for expression screening in , the potential expression of the construct was identified.
The construct vaccine performed well in computer-based immune response simulation and covered a variety of allelic populations. These computational results are more helpful for further analysis of our contract vaccine, which can finally help control and prevent SARS-CoV-2 infections worldwide.
近期的新冠疫苗已成功降低了死亡率和重症率，但并未阻止新型严重急性呼吸综合征冠状病毒2（SARS-CoV-2）毒株的病毒传播。对于众多流行毒株以及不断演变的SARS-CoV-2病毒，需要更好且持久的动态疫苗，因此有必要开发广谱毒株疫苗，通过降低传播率和再感染率来阻止感染。刺突（S）糖蛋白是SARS-CoV-2感染早期阶段普遍表达的蛋白质之一。它已被确定为SARS-CoV-2最具免疫原性的蛋白质。
在本研究中，利用先进的生物信息学技术，使用来自广泛的SARS-CoV-2毒株的保守S蛋白部分设计新型多表位疫苗，以预测B细胞和T细胞表位。这些表位是根据毒性、抗原性评分和免疫原性选择的。表位组合用于构建具有潜在免疫原性特征的最大效力多表位构建体。使用EAAAK、AAY和GPGPG作为连接子来构建表位。
所开发的疫苗已显示出阳性结果。将嵌合疫苗构建体克隆到PET28a(+)载体中进行表达筛选后，确定了该构建体的潜在表达。
该构建体疫苗在基于计算机的免疫反应模拟中表现良好，并且覆盖了多种等位基因群体。这些计算结果有助于对我们的候选疫苗进行进一步分析，最终有助于在全球范围内控制和预防SARS-CoV-2感染。
