With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the amount of data on genomic and proteomic sequences of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) stored in various databases has exponentially grown. A large volume of these data has led to the production of equally immense sets of immunological data, which require rigorous computational approaches to sort through and make sense of. Immunoinformatics has emerged in the recent decades as a field capable of offering this approach by bridging experimental and theoretical immunology with state-of-the-art computational tools. Here, we discuss how immunoinformatics can assist in the development of high-performance vaccines and drug discovery needed to curb the spread of SARS-CoV-2. Immunoinformatics can provide a set of computational tools to extract meaningful connections from the large sets of COVID-19 patient data, which can be implemented in the design of effective vaccines. With this in mind, we represent a pipeline to identify the role of immunoinformatics in COVID-19 treatment and vaccine development. In this process, a number of free databases of protein sequences, structures and mutations are introduced, along with docking web servers for assessing the interaction between antibodies and the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein segments as most commonly considered antigens in vaccine design.
Radioprotective effects of vitamin C and vitamin E as a water-soluble and a lipid-soluble agent, respectively, were investigated at the molecular level during the imposition of gamma radiation-induced structural changes to bovine serum albumin (BSA) at the therapeutic dose of 3 Gy. Secondary and tertiary structural changes of control and irradiated BSA samples were investigated using circular dichroism and fluorescence spectroscopy. The preirradiation tests showed nonspecific and reversible binding of vitamins C and E to BSA. Secondary and tertiary structures of irradiated BSA considerably changed in the absence of the vitamins. Upon irradiation, α-helices of BSA transitioned to beta motifs and random coils, and the fluorescence emission intensity decreased relative to nonirradiated BSA. In the presence of the vitamins C or E, however, the irradiated BSA was protected from these structural changes caused by reactive oxygen species (ROS). The two vitamins exhibited different patterns of attachment to the protein surface, as inspected by blind docking, and their mechanisms of protection were different. The hydrophilicity of vitamin C resulted in the predominant scavenging of ROS in the solvent, whereas hydrophobic vitamin E localized on the nonpolar patches of the BSA surface, where it did not only form a barrier for diffusing ROS but also encountered them as an antioxidant and neutralized them thanks to the moderate BSA binding constant. Very low concentrations of vitamins C or E (0.005 mg/mL) appear to be sufficient to prevent the oxidative damage of BSA.
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