In Silico Prediction of a Multitope Vaccine against Moraxella catarrhalis: Reverse Vaccinology and Immunoinformatics

Abstract

Moraxella catarrhalis (M. catarrhalis) is a Gram-negative bacterium that can cause serious respiratory tract infections and middle ear infections in children and adults. M. catarrhalis has demonstrated an increasing rate of antibiotic resistance in the last few years, thus development of an effective vaccine is a major health priority. We report here a novel designed multitope vaccine based on the mapped epitopes of the vaccine candidates filtered out of the whole proteome of M. catarrhalis. After analysis of 1615 proteins using a reverse vaccinology approach, only two proteins (outer membrane protein assembly factor BamA and LPS assembly protein LptD) were nominated as potential vaccine candidates. These proteins were found to be essential, outer membrane, virulent and non-human homologs with appropriate molecular weight and high antigenicity score. For each protein, cytotoxic T lymphocyte (CTL), helper T lymphocyte (HTL) and B cell lymphocyte (BCL) epitopes were predicted and confirmed to be highly antigenic and cover conserved regions of the proteins. The mapped epitopes constituted the base of the designed multitope vaccine where suitable linkers were added to conjugate them. Additionally, beta defensin adjuvant and pan-HLA DR-binding epitope (PADRE) peptide were also incorporated into the construct to improve the stimulated immune response. The constructed multitope vaccine was analyzed for its physicochemical, structural and immunological characteristics and it was found to be antigenic, soluble, stable, non-allergenic and have a high affinity to its target receptor. Although the in silico analysis of the current study revealed that the designed multitope vaccine has the ability to trigger a specific immune response against M. catarrhalis, additional translational research is required to confirm the effectiveness of the designed vaccine.

Pimenta dioica (L.) Merr. Bioactive Constituents Exert Anti-SARS-CoV-2 and Anti-Inflammatory Activities: Molecular Docking and Dynamics, In Vitro, and In Vivo Studies

“…Triangle matcher and London dG were selected as the placement and the scoring methodologies, respectively. Both the refinement methodology and the scoring one were changed to the rigid receptor and GBVI/WSA dG, respectively, to extract the best 10 poses produced from 100 poses for each docked molecule [76,77]. The best pose for each ligand with the most acceptable score, binding mode, and RMSD value was selected for further studies.…”

Proteome Based Approach Defines Candidates for Designing a Multitope Vaccine against the Nipah Virus

“…This progression led to the appearance of the immunoinformatics field, which can be defined as the interface between immunological data and computational tools that can handle these data [15]. This new approach was tried successfully against several pathogens ranging from bacteria such as Staphylococcus aureus [16] and Moraxella catarrhalis [17] to viruses such as Zika virus [18] and also fungi such as Candida albicans [19]. In the current study, the whole proteome of NiV was analyzed for antigenicity and virulence of each protein, where the best candidates were selected for B and T cell epitope prediction.…”

In Silico Designing of a Multitope Vaccine against Rhizopus microsporus with Potential Activity against Other Mucormycosis Causing Fungi

“…Based on that, the field of vaccine development witnessed the initiation of the immunoinformatics field as a modern approach that can predict vaccine candidates against harmful microorganisms [ 14 ]. The tools of immunoinformatics were applied to construct putative epitope vaccines against many microorganisms such Staphylococcus aureus [ 15 ], Moraxella catarrhalis [ 16 ], the Zika virus [ 17 ], Candida albicans [ 18 ], and Pseudomonas aeruginosa [ 19 ]. In addition to that, a biological validation has been performed for the multitope vaccine against Trichinella spiralis [ 20 ] and uropathogenic Escherichia coli [ 21 ], and the results were promising.…”