Integration of immunoinformatics and cheminformatics to design and evaluate a multitope vaccine against Klebsiella pneumoniae and Pseudomonas aeruginosa coinfection

Abstract

Introduction:Klebsiella pneumoniae (K. pneumoniae) and Pseudomonas aeruginosa (P. aeruginosa) are the most common Gram-negative bacteria associated with pneumonia and coinfecting the same patient. Despite their high virulence, there is no effective vaccine against them.Methods: In the current study, the screening of several proteins from both pathogens highlighted FepA and OmpK35 for K. pneumonia in addition to HasR and OprF from P. aeruginosa as promising candidates for epitope mapping. Those four proteins were linked to form a multitope vaccine, that was formulated with a suitable adjuvant, and PADRE peptides to finalize the multitope vaccine construct. The final vaccine’s physicochemical features, antigenicity, toxicity, allergenicity, and solubility were evaluated for use in humans.Results: The output of the computational analysis revealed that the designed multitope construct has passed these assessments with satisfactory scores where, as the last stage, we performed a molecular docking study between the potential vaccine construct and K. pneumonia associated immune receptors, TLR4 and TLR2, showing affinitive to both targets with preferentiality for the TLR4 receptor protein. Validation of the docking studies has proceeded through molecular dynamics simulation, which estimated a strong binding and supported the nomination of the designed vaccine as a putative solution for K. pneumoniae and P. aeruginosa coinfection. Here, we describe the approach for the design and assessment of our potential vaccine.

Vaccinomics-based next-generation multi-epitope chimeric vaccine models prediction against Leishmania tropica - a hierarchical subtractive proteomics and immunoinformatics approach

“…These proteins were non-homologous to human and human gut proteomes, as well as reported to be essential for the survival of the parasite. These proteins are predicted to be located in the extracellular regions and possibly be the first molecules to interact with the host cells; hence, making them ideal vaccine candidates to target ( 74 ). Stringent criteria were followed to identify CTL, HTL, and linear B-cell epitopes.…”