Reverse vaccinology approaches to design a potent multiepitope vaccine against the HIV whole genome: immunoinformatic, bioinformatics, and molecular dynamics approaches

Abstract

Substantial advances have been made in the development of promising HIV vaccines to eliminate HIV-1 infection. For the first time, one hundred of the most submitted HIV subtypes and CRFs were retrieved from the LANL database, and the consensus sequences of the eleven HIV proteins were obtained to design vaccines for human and mouse hosts. By using various servers and filters, highly qualified B-cell epitopes, as well as HTL and CD8 + epitopes that were common between mouse and human alleles and were also located in the conserved domains of HIV proteins, were considered in the vaccine constructs. With 90% coverage worldwide, the human vaccine model covers a diverse allelic population, making it widely available. Codon optimization and in silico cloning in prokaryotic and eukaryotic vectors guarantee high expression of the vaccine models in human and E. coli hosts. Molecular dynamics confirmed the stable interaction of the vaccine constructs with TLR3, TLR4, and TLR9, leading to a substantial immunogenic response to the designed vaccine. Vaccine models effectively target the humoral and cellular immune systems in humans and mice; however, experimental validation is needed to confirm these findings in silico.