Contriving a multi-epitope vaccine against African swine fever utilizing immunoinformatics

Abstract

African swine fever (ASF), a highly fatal haemorrhagic viral disease of domestic pigs has been ravaging swine industries in affected countries. Effective management of this malady is hamstrung by lack of protective vaccines. A cost-effective avenue to develop potent ASF vaccines is by harnessing immunoinformatic tools to construct a multi-epitope broad spectrum subunit vaccine. Therefore, CD8 + T-cell, CD4 + T-cell, B-cell and IFN-γ epitopes of the ASF virus major coat protein p72, CD2 homologue (CD2v) and C-type lectin-like proteins which are good vaccine candidates were computationally appended to develop ASF multi-epitope subunit vaccine. Molecular docking and molecular dynamic simulation were employed to assess the interaction between the vaccine construct and immune receptors Toll-like-9 (TLR-9) and the Swine Leukocyte Antigen-1 (SLA-1) and stable interactions were observed between the vaccine construct and immune receptors. in silico cloning and codon optimization were used to bolster the efficient expression of the vaccine in an E. coli expression system. The efficacy of the vaccine to provoke effective immune responses was assessed using in silico immune simulation. All these computational approaches revealed that the designed vaccine is structurally stable and capable of inducing both humoral and cell-mediated immune responses against ASF.