Novel Multi Epitopes Vaccine Candidates against Vesicular Stomatitis Virus through Reverse Vaccinology

Abstract

Vesicular stomatitis (VS) is a disease of horses, cattle and swine caused by vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV). The virus belongs to the genus Vesiculovirus of the family Rhabdoviridae. The disease has no treatment or vaccine. Therefore the aim of this study was to design multi-epitopes vaccine against vesicular stomatitis New Jersey virus using peptides of the glycoprotein to stimulate protective immune response. A total of 46 sequences of the Glycoprotein of VSV were retrieved from NCBI database. Sequences were aligned to determine the conservancy and to predict epitopes using IEDB analysis resource. Six epitopes were predicted as promising B cell epitopes since they fulfilled the criteria of surface accessibility, antigenicity and proposed as most probable B cell epitope. These epitopes were 393-VLKTKQGYK-401, 147-PHSVKVDEY-155, 454-SKNPVEL-460, 240-CRKPGYKL-247, 427-HPHIE-431 and 505-PIYKS-509. For T cell; four epitopes 86-FRWYGPKYI-94, 184-FTSSDGESV-192, 189-GESVCSQLF-197 and 108-CLEAIKAYK-116 were proposed as MHC-I epitopes since they interacted with the highest numbers of alleles and with high binding affinity. For MHC-II four epitopes namely 241LKNDLWFQI255, 86FRWYGPKYI94, 184FTSSDGESV192, and 18IEIVFPQHT26 were proposed as peptide vaccine since they interacted with high affinity to MHC-II alleles. It is noteworthy the epitopes 86-FRWYGPKYI-94, 184-FTSSDGESV-192 were found interacting with both MHC-I and MHC-II. Thus they further used for docking with the equine haplotype molecules (ELA-A3) where they demonstrated lowest binding energy to the equine MHC class I molecule haplotype. To our knowledge there is no epitope based vaccine for the Vesicular stomatitis New Jersey Virus (VSV-NJ) via reverse vaccinology. In this study, twelve epitopes were proposed eliciting both humeral and cell mediated immunity and predicted to act as a promising peptide vaccine against VSV. Clinical trial is required to proof these epitopes as an efficient vaccine against vesicular stomatitis virus.