Contriving a chimeric polyvalent vaccine to prevent infections caused by herpes simplex virus (type-1 and type-2): an exploratory immunoinformatic approach

Abstract

Herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV-1) and 2 (HSV-2) cause a variety of infections including oral-facial infections, genital herpes, herpes keratitis, cutaneous infection and so on. To date, FDA-approved licensed HSV vaccine is not available yet. Hence, the study was conducted to identify and characterize an effective epitope based polyvalent vaccine against both types of Herpes Simplex Virus through targeting six viral proteins. The selected proteins were retrieved from viralzone and assessed to design highly antigenic epitopes by binding analyses of the peptides with MHC class-I and class-II molecules, antigenicity screening, transmembrane topology screening, allergenicity and toxicity assessment, population coverage analysis and molecular docking approach. The final vaccine was constructed by the combination of top CTL, HTL and BCL epitopes from each protein along with suitable adjuvant and linkers. Physicochemical and secondary structure analysis, disulfide engineering, molecular dynamic simulation and codon adaptation were further employed to develop a unique multi-epitope peptide vaccine. Docking analysis of the refined vaccine structure with different MHC molecules and human immune TLR-2 receptor demonstrated higher interaction. Complexed structure of the modeled vaccine and TLR-2 showed minimal deformability at molecular level. Moreover, translational potency and microbial expression of the modeled vaccine was analyzed with pET28a(+) vector for E. coli strain strain K12. The study enabled design of a novel chimeric polyvalent vaccine to confer broad range immunity against both HSV serotypes. However, further wet lab based research using model animals are highly recommended to experimentally validate our findings.

In-silico designing of epitope-based vaccine against the seven banded grouper nervous necrosis virus affecting fish species

“…The N and C terminal of flagellin protein, RS09 peptide were used as adjuvants (Negahdaripour et al 2017 ; Yazdani et al 2020 ). Pan DR epitope (PADRE) sequence was used to counter the problems caused by polymorphic HLA alleles and to improve the stability of the vaccine (Hasan et al 2019 ). To link the epitopes and adjuvants linker sequence GGS was used (Yazdani et al 2020 ).…”

Comprehensive genome based analysis of Vibrio parahaemolyticus for identifying novel drug and vaccine molecules: Subtractive proteomics and vaccinomics approach

“…Several advantages help the researchers to select membrane proteins both as drug and vaccine candidates as their functions can be easily studied through computer-based approaches PLOS ONE than wet-lab process [89,108]. In this study, two vaccine targets, 'Sensor histidine protein kinase UhpB (Q87HJ8)' and 'Flagellar hook-associated protein (Q87JH9)' were selected after screening the novel outer-membrane proteins (25) based on their antigenicity score and human microbiome non-homology analysis (Table 6).…”

“…The final vaccine constructs were designed with the help of different adjuvants and amino acid linkers [84]. It has been reported that the PADRE sequence reduces the polymorphism of HLA molecules in the population [108,109]. Linkers in vaccines also enhanced the immunogenicity of the vaccines in previous studies [110,111].…”

Designing of a multi-epitope vaccine candidate against Nipah virus by in silico approach: a putative prophylactic solution for the deadly virus

“…Henceforth, in the current approach, we have checked the propensity of the multi-epitope vaccine construct of the Nipah virus and human TLR3 complex. This epitope-based vaccine development approach has been explored and proved to be promising in a number of diseases caused by viruses like Herpes simplex virus (Hasan et al, 2019;Kumar et al, 2019), Yellow Fever Virus (Tosta et al, 2019), SARS Coronavirus (Srivastava et al, 2019), Chikungunya (Bappy et al, 2020), Dengue (Sabetian, Nezafat, Dorosti, Zarei, & Ghasemi, 2019), Alkhurma hemorrhagic fever virus (Ul-Rahman & Shabbir, 2019), etc. as well as by other pathogens including Leishmania donovani (Khatoon et al, 2019), Elizabethkingia anophelis (Nain et al, 2019), Flavobacterium columnare (Bhattacharya et al, 2020), Bacillus anthracis (Gupta, Khatoon, Mishra, Verma, & Prajapati, 2019), Streptococcus pneumoniae (Dorosti et al, 2019), Helicobacter pylori (Pasala et al, 2019), etc.…”