Abstract
African swine fever virus is the etiological agent of African swine fever, a transmissible severe hemorrhagic disease that affects pigs, causing massive economic losses. There is neither a treatment nor a vaccine available, and the only method to control its spread is by extensive culling of pigs. So far, classical vaccine development approaches have not yielded sufficiently good results in terms of concomitant safety and efficacy. Nowadays, thanks to advances in genomic and proteomic techniques, a reverse vaccinology strategy can be explored to design alternative vaccine formulations. In this study, ASFV protein sequences were analyzed using an in-house pipeline based on publicly available immunoinformatic tools to identify epitopes of interest for a prospective vaccine ensemble. These included experimentally validated sequences from the Immune Epitope Database, as well as de novo predicted sequences. Experimentally validated and predicted epitopes were prioritized following a series of criteria that included evolutionary conservation, presence in the virulent and currently circulating variant Georgia 2007/1, and lack of identity to either the pig proteome or putative proteins from pig gut microbiota. Following this strategy, 29 B-cell, 14 CD4+ T-cell and 6 CD8+ T-cell epitopes were selected, which represent a starting point to investigating the protective capacity of ASFV epitope-based vaccines.
Highlights
African swine fever virus (ASFV), the causative agent of African swine fever (ASF), stands among the most lethal pathogens that infect domestic pigs (Sus scrofa) worldwide
A total of 7088 ASFV protein sequences were downloaded from the 46 available proteomes of the virus in UniProt (Supplementary Table S1)
In order to consider ASFV variability in each resulting cluster, we filtered out clusters with sequences that originated from fewer than 14 distinct proteomes
Summary
African swine fever virus (ASFV), the causative agent of African swine fever (ASF), stands among the most lethal pathogens that infect domestic pigs (Sus scrofa) worldwide. First described in the 1920s in Kenya after the introduction of European domestic pigs in the country [1], disease outbreaks were mostly circumscribed to eastern and southern sub-Saharan Africa during the first half of the 20th century. Since it has spread across the globe causing epidemics not just in other African countries, and in Europe, the Caribbean, South America, Oceania and Asia. The last importation of ASFV from Africa to Europe triggered the biggest ASF epidemic ever documented, becoming the number one threat for today’s global swine industry [2,3]. Due to its potential devastating impact, ASF is listed as a disease of obliged notification to the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE).
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