Immunoinformatics design of multi-epitope peptide for the diagnosis of Schistosoma haematobium infection

Abstract

Schistosoma haematobium has been identified as a significant cause of urogenital disease, as well as a risk factor for bladder cancer and HIV/AIDS. The parasites are obtained trans-dermally by swimming or wading in contaminated freshwater, and they are also transmitted to humans by freshwater snails. The organisms infect the vasculature of the gastrointestinal or genitourinary tracts. Worms live in blood vessels and lay eggs that become embedded in the bladder wall, causing chronic immune-mediated disease and squamous cell carcinoma growth. The primary goal of this research is to predict and design a novel synthetic protein containing multiple immunodominant B cell epitopes using three schistosome proteins: XP-012801068.2, XP-012801892.2, and XP-012793835.2 softwares were used to analyze the proteins’ primary, secondary, and tertiary structures (BepiPred, BcPred).The B cell construct was then evaluated using I-TASSER server, and physicochemical properties, as well as homology modeling of the 3 D structure of the protein, was obtained. In silico analyses revealed regions with high immunogenicity. For XP-012801068.2, three epitopes are found between residues 292–334, 3–22, and 314–333; for XP-012801892.2, three epitopes are found in the residues 184–236, 81–100, and 329–348 for XP-012793835.2, four epitopes are found in the residues 185–222, 469–512, 649–713, and 338–357. The construct’s has an average length of 308 bp, instability index of 49.96, theoretical PI of 4.2 and a C score −1.59. Furthermore, these parameters analyzed reveals that the constructed multi-epitope peptide has the potential to provide a theoretical basis for the development of a Schistosoma haematobium diagnostic kit. Communicated by Ramaswamy H. Sarma