Immunogenic multi-epitope-based vaccine development to combat cyclosporiasis of immunocompromised patients applying computational biology method.

Abstract

Cyclospora cayetanensis infections, also known as cyclosporiasis, persist to be the prevalent emerging protozoan parasite and an opportunist that causes digestive illness in immunocompromised individuals. In contrast, this causal agent can affect people of all ages, with children and foreigners being the most susceptible populations. For most immunocompetent patients, the disease is self-limiting; in extreme circumstances, this illness can manifest as severe or persistent diarrhea as well as colonize on secondary digestive organs leading to death. According to recent reports, worldwide 3.55% of people are infected by this pathogen, with Asia and Africa being more prevalent. For the treatment, trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole is the only licensed drug and does not appear to work as well in some patient populations. Therefore, the much more effective strategy to avoid this illness is immunization through the vaccine. This present study uses immunoinformatics for identifying a computational multi-epitope-based peptide vaccine candidate for Cyclospora cayetanensis. Following the review of the literature, a highly efficient, secure, and vaccine complex based on multi-epitopes was designed by utilizing the identified proteins. These selected proteins were then used to predict non-toxic and antigenic HTL-epitopes, B-cell-epitopes, and CTL-epitopes. Ultimately, both a few linkers and an adjuvant were combined to create a vaccine candidate with superior immunological epitopes. Then, to establish the vaccine-TLR complex binding constancy, the TLR receptor and vaccine candidates were placed into the FireDock, PatchDock, and ClusPro servers for molecular docking and iMODS server for molecular-dynamic simulation. Finally, this selected vaccine construct was cloned into Escherichia coli strain-K12; thus, the constructed vaccines against Cyclospora cayetanensiscould improve the host immune response and can be produced experimentally.