In Silico Screening of Schistosome Membrane Proteins as Candidate Diagnostic Antigens for Asian Schistosomiasis

Abstract

Asian schistosomiasis is primarily caused by Schistosoma japonicum. Given the relatively low prevalence of the disease, efforts are now focused on its elimination. However, the low sensitivity of the current diagnostic techniques underestimates the actual prevalence of schistosomiasis in areas with low endemicity. Therefore, this study aims to identify candidate diagnostic antigens that are potentially useful for the development of a reliable serological diagnosis of Asian schistosomiasis using the genomic databases of S. haematobium and S. japonicum. On the SchistoDB database, this study first employed a preliminary genomic filtration on 12,021 S. haematobium genes – including the presence of transmembrane domain, signal peptides, isoelectric point, and molecular weight yielding 113 genes. Further gene ontology (GO) enrichment analysis resulted in 22 candidate S. haematobium genes. These S. haematobium genes were then compared with the S. japonicum genome in the WormBase ParaSite, identifying 36 S. japonicum homologous proteins. The amino acid sequences of the 36 proteins were aligned using ClustalW to identify identical proteins, resulting in 21 distinct S. japonicum proteins considered as the final set of candidate diagnostic antigens. Therefore, these 21 candidate diagnostic antigens can be useful in developing a reliable serological diagnosis of Asian schistosomiasis, which may be accomplished through in vitro validation, protein characterization, and serological evaluation.