Abstract
Clostridium difficile (CD) infections are a growing threat due to the strain resistance to antibiotic treatment and the emergence of hypervirulent strains. One solution to this problem is the search for new vaccine antigens, preferably surface-localized that will be recognized by antibodies at an early stage of colonization. The purpose of the study was to assess the usefulness of novel immunoreactive surface proteins (epitopes) as potential vaccine antigens. Such approach might be tough to pursue since pathogens have acquired strategies to subvert adaptive immune response to produce humoral response against non-essential proteins for their survival. In this study CD surface proteins were isolated, immunoreactive proteins identified and mapped to select potential epitopes. The results of the study exclude the use of CD glyceraldehyde 3-phosphate dehydrogenase as a vaccine antigen, especially as a whole protein. Sequences P9 (201AAGNIVPNTTGAAKAI218) and P10 (224KGKLDGAAQRVPVVTG241) recognized by patients sera are conserved and widespread among CD strains. They show cross-reactivity with sera of people suffering from other bacterial infections and are recognized by sera of autoimmune disease patients. Our study documents that special care in analyzing the sequence of new epitope should be taken to avoid side effects prior to consider it as a vaccine antigen.
Highlights
Designing new microbiological vaccines is a complicated and risky process due to the fact that microorganisms use devious techniques of avoiding the immune system
In the current research glyceraldehyde 3-phosphate dehydrogenase (GAPDH) was identified as an immunoreactive protein reacting with antibodies from umbilical cord blood sera collected from mothers without the signs of Clostridium difficile infections (CDI)
GAPDH is an immunoreactive protein recognized by umbilical cord blood sera
Summary
Designing new microbiological vaccines is a complicated and risky process due to the fact that microorganisms use devious techniques of avoiding the immune system. The mechanism which leads to production of these autoantibodies is still unknown but recently, some authors suggested that these autoantibodies can be primarily initiated by T and B cells reacting to foreign GAPDH, present on the surfaces of parasites, bacteria and fungi[16,17]. The aim of these studies was to evaluate the effectiveness of immunoreactive surface antigens from Clostridium difficile (CD) as potential vaccine antigens. Those two epitopes were further investigated to exclude cross-reactivity with other pathogenic and non-pathogenic species, and autoimmunoreactivity
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