Abstract
Human adenoviruses (HAdVs) are the etiologic agent of many human infectious diseases. The existence of at least 54 different serotypes of HAdVs has resulted in difficulties in clinical diagnosis. Acute respiratory tract disease (ARD) caused by some serotypes from B and C species is particularly serious. Hexon, the main coat protein of HAdV, contains the major serotype-specific B cell epitopes; however, few studies have addressed epitope mapping in most HAdV serotypes. In this study, we utilized a novel and rapid method for the modeling of homologous proteins based on the phylogenetic tree of protein families and built three-dimensional (3D) models of hexon proteins in B and C species HAdVs. Based on refined hexon structures, we used reverse evolutionary trace (RET) bioinformatics analysis combined with a specially designed hexon epitope screening algorithm to achieve high-throughput epitope mapping of all 13 hexon proteins in B and C species HAdVs. This study has demonstrated that all of the epitopes from the 13 hexon proteins are located in the proteins' tower regions; however, the exact number, location, and size of the epitopes differ among the HAdV serotypes.
Highlights
Human adenoviruses (HAdVs) are nonenveloped, double-stranded DNA viruses with icosahedral capsids [1]
This result is consistent with previous reports [24,26]; 2OBE formed the template for modeling the B species hexons and 1P2Z and 1P30 formed the templates for modeling the C species hexons
The traditional typing methods for infectious HAdVs are mostly based on virus isolation and culture or PCR reaction, which are complex and time consuming and cannot meet the requirement for rapid typing of HAdV infection
Summary
HAdVs are nonenveloped, double-stranded DNA (dsDNA) viruses with icosahedral capsids [1]. At least 54 standard HAdV serotypes are presently recognized based mainly on the neutralization by specific antisera. These serotypes are in turn divided into six species (A, B, C, D, E, and F, with B species further divided into B1 and B2 sub-species) [2,3,4]. HAdVs are associated with a wide spectrum of human clinical infectious diseases [1,5,6,7], including ARD [8], conjunctivitis, viral gastroenteritis, acute haemorrhagic cystitis, encephalitis, and obesity, and seriously threaten human health. The existence of at least 13 different serotypes of B and C species HAdVs and co-infection has brought difficulties to the clinical diagnosis [14]
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