Multi Epitopic Peptide Based Vaccine Development Targeting Immobilization Antigen of Ichthyophthirius multifiliis: A Computational Approach

Abstract

The white spot disease causes significant damage to global aquaculture production. A prominent vaccine, eliciting the immunogenicity of freshwater fishes against Ichthyophthirius multifiliis yet to be developed. Thus, an Immunoinformatic drive was implemented to find out the potential epitopes from the surface immobilization antigens. B-cell derived T-cell epitopes are promiscuous elements for new generation peptide-based vaccine designing. A total of eight common B and T-cell epitopes had filtered out with no overlapping manner. Subsequently, the common epitopes are linked up with EAAAKEAAAKEAAAK linker peptides, we also added L7/L12 ribosomal protein adjuvant at the N- terminal side of peptide sequence for eliciting the immune response in a better way. The secondary and tertiary structural properties of the modeled 3D protein revealed that the protein had all the properties required for a protective immunogen. Afterward, three globally used validation server: PROCKECK, ProSA and ERRAT were used to justify the proper coordinate. NMR, Crystallographic range and error plot calculation for vaccine model also been done respectively. This was followed by molecular docking, MD simulation, NMA analysis, in silico cloning and vaccine dose-based immune response simulation to evaluate the immunogenic potency of the vaccine construct. The in silico immune simulation in response to multi-epitopes show antibody generation and elevated levels of cell-mediated immunity during repeated exposure of the vaccine. The favourable results of the in silico analysis significantly specify that the vaccine construct is really a powerful vaccine candidate and ready to proceed to the next steps of experimental validation and efficacy studies. Graphical Abstract Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10989-022-10475-1.

Riding the wave of innovation: immunoinformatics in fish disease control

“…In addition, the functional similarities of immune cell receptors (B- and T-cell receptors) between fish and human enables the application of these tools to predict potential epitopes that are immunogenic in fish, based on the knowledge of B- and T-cell receptors in human. These tools have been utilized and demonstrated success in predicting epitopes for vaccine design against tilapia lake virus ( Islam et al, 2022a ) and Edwardsiella ictaluri in Nile tilapia ( Machimbirike et al, 2022a ), Streptococcus iniae ( Forouharmehr et al, 2022a ), Flavobacterium columnare ( Mahendran et al, 2016b ), and against Ichthyophthirius multifiliis ( Ghosh et al, 2023 ). Nonetheless, experimental validation studies are indispensable.…”