Lassa virus (LASV) is an arena virus causing hemorrhagic fever and it is endemic in several regions of West Africa. The disease-causing virus records high mortality rate in endemic regions due to lack of appropriate treatment and prevention strategies. Therefore, it is of interest to design and develop viable vaccine components against the virus. We used the Lassa virus envelope glyco-proteins as a vaccine target to identify linear peptides as potential epitopes with immunogenic properties by computer aided epitope prediction tools. We report a T-cell epitope 'LLGTFTWTL' and a B-cell epitope 'AELKCFGNTAVAKCNE' with predicted potential immunogenicity for further in vivo and in vitro consideration.

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Abiotic stresses like salinity and drought directly affect plant growth and water availability, resulting in lower yield in rice. So, a combination of stress tolerance along with enhanced grain yield is a major focus of rice breeding. It was reported earlier that loss in function of the drought and salt tolerance (DST) gene results in increase in grain production through downregulating Gn1a/OsCKX2 expression. Moreover, dst mutants also showed enhanced drought and salt tolerance in rice by regulating genes involved in ROS homeostasis. In the present study, we proceeded to test these reports by downregulating DST using artificial microRNA technology in the commercial but salt sensitive, high-yielding, BRRIdhan 28 (BR28). This cultivar was transformed with DST_artificial microRNA (DST_amiRNA) driven by the constitutive CaMV35S promoter using tissue culture independent Agrobacterium mediated in planta transformation. DST_amiRNA transgenic plants were confirmed by artificial microRNA specific PCR. Transformed plants at T 0 generation showed vigorous growth with significantly longer panicle length and higher primary branching resulting in higher yield, compared to the wild type (WT) BR28. Semi-quantitative RT PCR confirmed the decrease in DST expression in the BR28 transgenic plants compared to WT. T 1 transgenic plants also showed improvement in a number of physiological parameters and greater growth compared to WT after 14 days of 120 mM salt (NaCl) stress at seedling stage. Therefore, DST downregulated transgenic plants showed both higher stress tolerance as well as better yields. Furthermore, stable inheritance of the improved phenotype of the DST_amiRNA transgenics will be tested in advanced generations.