A Computational Approach for Designing a Universal Epitope-Based Peptide Vaccine Against Nipah Virus

Abstract

Nipah virus (NiV) is highly pathogenic single-stranded negative sense RNA virus. It can cause severe encephalitis and respiratory disease in humans. In addition, NiV infects a large range of host including mammals. As a result of its higher zoonotic potential and pathogenicity for human, it has been rated as an alert in recent days. A therapeutic treatment or vaccines has become elusive to fight against this virus. In this study, the attachment (G) and fusion (F) glycoproteins of NiV, responsible for the viral attachment and entry to the host cell, were selected to develop epitope-based vaccine against Nipah virus. Epitopes were identified from the conserved region of G and F protein of NiV. Both B-cell and T-cell immunity were checked to affirm it that these epitopes will be able to induce humoral and cellular immunity. A total of 6 T-cell epitopes and 19 significant HLA-epitope interactions were identified. Eventually it has shown an acceptable percentage in population coverage (46.45 %) and efficient binding with HLA molecule by molecular docking study.

Epitope-Based Peptide Vaccine against Glycoprotein G of Nipah Henipavirus Using Immunoinformatics Approaches

“…Due to the potency of glycoprotein G over F, we have considered this incident to be the target of this study. There are a lot of challenges regarding the development of peptide-based vaccines, and therefore, we have decided to study and propose a new vaccine against the Nipah virus, since they make a helpful alternative strategy that relies on the usage of short peptide fragments to induce immune responses [23][24][25][26]. Antigenic epitopes from single proteins may not be really necessary, whereas some of these epitopes may even be detrimental to the induction of protective immunity.…”

Epitope - based peptide vaccine against glycoprotein G of Nipah henipavirus using immunoinformatics approaches

“…It could be the first vaccine developed for humans against glycoprotein G of Nipah henipavirus to be put forward using an immunoinformatics approach and population coverage analytical tools. Even though there's a lot of challenges regarding the development of peptide vaccines, we have decided to develop them for fighting the Nipah virus infection because they make a very good alternative strategy that relies on the usage of short peptide fragments to induce immune responses that are extremely targeted, avoiding all allergenic as well as reactogenic sequences [23][24][25][26] . Antigenic epitopes from single proteins may not be really necessary, whereas some of these epitopes may even be detrimental to the induction of protective immunity.…”

sNebula, a network-based algorithm to predict binding between human leukocyte antigens and peptides

“…Thus, computational methods can play a crucial role in the study of HLA-peptide binding. Though some computational approaches have been proposed for prediction of HLA-peptide binding2136, the practicability is limited since many methods do not support HLAs with few binding peptides or peptides that are diverse in length. Some recently developed methods such as NetMHCpan252627, NetMHC37 and kernel functions2538 can predict for peptides with different lengths; however, extra processes3940 are usually required to identify core binding sequences within the peptides so that they can be converted to a fixed length.…”