An unusual pneumonia infection, named COVID-19, was reported on December 2019 in China. It was reported to be caused by a novel coronavirus which has infected approximately 8.7 million people worldwide with a death toll of 463000 till date. This study is focused on finding potential vaccine candidates and designing an in-silico subunit multi-epitope vaccine candidates using a unique computational pipeline, integrating reverse vaccinology and molecular docking methods. A protein named SARS-CoV-spike [S] protein of SARS-CoV-2 having GenBank ID- QHD43416.1 was shortlisted, as a potential vaccine candidate and was examined for the presence of B-cell and T-cell epitopes. We also investigated antigenicity and interaction with distinct polymorphic alleles of the epitopes. High ranking epitopes/peptides such as DLCFTNVY (B cell class), KIADYNKL (MHC Class-I) and VKNKCVNFN (MHC class-II) were shortlisted for subsequent analysis. Digestion analysis verified the safety and stability of the shortlisted peptides. Docking study reported a strong binding of proposed peptides with HLA-A*02 and HLA-B7 alleles. We used standard methods to construct vaccine model and this construct was evaluated further for its antigenicity, physicochemical properties, 2D and 3D structure prediction and validation. Finally, the vaccine construct was reverse transcribed and adapted for E. coli strain K 12 prior to the insertion within the pET-28-a (+) vector for determining translational and microbial expression. Also, six multi-epitope subunit vaccines were constructed using different strategies containing immunogenic epitopes, appropriate adjuvants and linker sequences. We propose that our vaccine constructs can be used for downstream investigations using in-vitro and in-vivo studies to design effective and safe vaccine against COVID19.
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