Background Visceral Leishmaniasis (VL) is a fatal vector-borne parasitic disorder occurring mainly in tropical and subtropical regions. VL falls under the category of neglected tropical diseases with growing drug resistance and lacking a licensed vaccine. Conventional vaccine synthesis techniques are often very laborious and challenging. With the advancement of bioinformatics and its application in immunology, it is now more convenient to design multi-epitope vaccines comprising predicted immuno-dominant epitopes of multiple antigenic proteins. We have chosen four antigenic proteins of Leishmania donovani and identified their T-cell and B-cell epitopes, utilizing those for in-silico chimeric vaccine designing. The various physicochemical characteristics of the vaccine have been explored and the tertiary structure of the chimeric construct is predicted to perform docking studies and molecular dynamics simulations. Results The vaccine construct is generated by joining the epitopes with specific linkers. The predicted tertiary structure of the vaccine has been found to be valid and docking studies reveal the construct shows a high affinity towards the TLR-4 receptor. Population coverage analysis shows the vaccine can be effective on the majority of the world population. In-silico immune simulation studies confirms the vaccine to raise a pro-inflammatory response with the proliferation of activated T and B cells. In-silico codon optimization and cloning of the vaccine nucleic acid sequence have also been achieved in the pET28a vector. Conclusion The above bioinformatics data support that the construct may act as a potential vaccine. Further wet lab synthesis of the vaccine and in vivo works has to be undertaken in animal model to confirm vaccine potency.

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An indicator is essential to predict the potential for phosphorus (P) movement from a nonpoint soil source to surface water bodies, causing environmental pollution. The present study was undertaken with terai and lateritic acidic soils of eastern India to estimate their environmental threshold degree of P saturation (DPS) values as an indicator of the potential risk for P loss. Comparisons of DPS with soil-test P and water-soluble P suggested that DPS could be a useful environmental indicator. The change point DPS with Bray-1 extractant were 17.8 and 19.8% and with Mehlich-1extractant were 16.9 and 18.3% for terai and lateritic soils, respectively. The water-soluble P at those corresponding change points were 2.94 and 3.42 mg kg-1 with Bray-1 and 2.83 and 3.34 mg kg-1 with the Mehlich-1 method for terai and lateritic soil, respectively. The relationship between DPS (%) estimated with Bray-1 extractant (DPSB-1) and Bray-1P (mg kg-1) revealed that agronomic optimum values of Bray-1 P could not indicate the environmental risk. Therefore, considering the change points, confidence intervals and agronomic soil test values, we can recommend replacing Bray-1P with three categories of DPSB-1: <20%, 20-40% and >40% as safe, warrant and critical levels of P loss from Indian soils, respectively.

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