Bioinformatics analysis of calcium-dependent protein kinase 4 (CDPK4) as Toxoplasma gondii vaccine target

Masoud Foroutan,Ali Dalir Ghaffari,Ali Taghipour,Shahrzad Soltani,Hamidreza Majidiani,Mohamad Sabaghan

doi:10.1186/s13104-021-05467-1

Abstract

ObjectivesToxoplasma gondii (T. gondii), an obligate intracellular apicomplexan parasite, could affect numerous warm-blooded animals, such as humans. Calcium-dependent protein kinases (CDPKs) are essential Ca2+ signaling mediators and participate in parasite host cell egress, outer membrane motility, invasion, and cell division.ResultsSeveral bioinformatics online servers were employed to analyze and predict the important properties of CDPK4 protein. The findings revealed that CDPK4 peptide has 1158 amino acid residues with average molecular weight (MW) of 126.331 KDa. The aliphatic index and GRAVY for this protein were estimated at 66.82 and – 0.650, respectively. The findings revealed that the CDPK4 protein comprised 30.14% and 34.97% alpha-helix, 59.84% and 53.54% random coils, and 10.02% and 11.49% extended strand with SOPMA and GOR4 tools, respectively. Ramachandran plot output showed 87.87%, 8.40%, and 3.73% of amino acid residues in the favored, allowed, and outlier regions, respectively. Also, several potential B and T-cell epitopes were predicted for CDPK4 protein through different bioinformatics tools. Also, antigenicity and allergenicity evaluation demonstrated that this protein has immunogenic and non-allergenic nature. This paper presents a basis for further studies, thereby provides a fundamental basis for the development of an effective vaccine against T. gondii infection.

Highlights

Toxoplasma gondii (T. gondii), a compulsory intracellular parasite, could affect most warm-blooded animals, such as humans [1, 2]
Retrieval of CDPK4 protein sequence of T. gondii First, the complete amino acid sequence of T. gondii CDPK4 protein was attained from ToxoDB server
Initial overview of the protein CDPK4 The amino acid sequence of CDPK4 protein was determined by the ToxoDB server under the accession ID: TGME49_237890

Summary

Introduction

Toxoplasma gondii (T. gondii), a compulsory intracellular parasite, could affect most warm-blooded animals, such as humans [1, 2]. The current drugs against toxoplasmosis are not effective enough and are associated with serious side effects [3]. Foroutan et al BMC Res Notes (2021) 14:50 studies, vaccination with CDPK1 [13, 18, 19], CDPK2 [20], CDPK3 [15, 21, 22], CDPK5 [14], and CDPK6 [16] induced strong humoral and cellular responses and prolonged the survival time in mouse models. Predicting epitopes is highly important for the determination of an antigen’s immunogenicity in vaccine development. Bioinformatics tools and online resources can enable researchers to predict and recognize the potential epitopes of B- and T-cells [23–26]. Bioinformatics has recently become the preferred interdisciplinary new science for analyzing biological data using defined computer science, mathematics, statistics, physics, biology, medicine technologies and algorithms [23, 26]. The current study was performed to analyze the several important features of CDPK4 protein using different bioinformatics servers

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion