A systematic, functional genomics, and reverse vaccinology approach to the identification of vaccine candidates in the cattle tick, Rhipicephalus microplus

Immunogenicity Prediction by VaxiJen: A Ten Year Overview

“…A systematic approach using a combination of functional genomics (DNA microarrays) techniques and a pipeline of in silico predictions of subcellular localization and protective antigenicity using VaxiJen was used to identify novel anti-tick candidate vaccines [177]. 791 candidates were identified, of which 176 were membraneassociated and 86 secreted soluble proteins.…”

Comparative microarray analyses of adult female midgut tissues from feeding Rhipicephalus species

“…contigs was reported previously (Maritz-Olivier et al, 2012). This database comprised all available EST data from GenBank (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nucest) and release 2.1 of the R. microplus gene index (Wang et al, 2007), which was then used to create an Agilent 8x15k 60-mer microarray.…”

“…The percentage occurrence (via χ2 analysis) of each KOG biological term for each gene list was compared with an in-house assembled R. microplus database to determine their abundance in R. microplus and/or R. decoloratus (Maritz-Olivier et al, 2012). It was found that genes involved in lipid transport and metabolism were significantly enriched among the abundant transcripts for R. microplus and R.…”

“…Given the shortcomings of the Bm86 vaccines, novel vaccines need to be discovered. To date, the rate-limiting step in vaccine production has been the identification of effective antigens (Mulenga et al, 2000;Willadsen, 2001), but studies involving functional genomics, combined with reverse vaccinology, have led to the identification of numerous potential vaccine candidates (Maritz-Olivier et al, 2012).…”

“…In this study, genes found to be shared between the midgut tissues of R. microplus and R. decoloratus adult females have been evaluated using our reverse vaccinology pipeline with promising results (Maritz-Olivier et al, 2012). With vaccine design in mind, considering genes that are expressed in the midgut of both tick species, 6,730 genes were identified.…”