Title

A novel strategy of epitope design in Neisseria gonorrhoeae

Authors

Debmalya Barh¹*, Amarendra Narayan Misra², Anil Kumar³, Vasco Azevedo⁴*

Affiliation

1Centre for Genomics and Applied Gene Technology, Institute of Integrative Omics and Applied Biotechnology (IIOAB), Nonakuri, Purba Medinipur, WB-721172, India. 2Department of Biosciences and Biotechnology, School of Biotechnology, Fakir Mohan University, Jnan Bigyan Vihar, Balasore- 756020, Orissa, India. 3School of Biotechnology, Devi Ahilya University, Khandwa Road, Indore, MP-452001, India; 4Laboratorio de Genetica Celular e Molecular, Departmento de Biologia Geral, Instituto de Ciencias Biologics, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais CP 486, CEP 31270-901 Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil

E-mail*

dr.barh@gmail.com; * Corresponding author

Phone

+91-944955 0032

Article Type

Hypothesis

Date

received  March23, 2010; revised May17, 2010; accepted  June8, 2010; published online July6, 2010

In spite of genome sequences of both human and N. gonorrhoeae in hand, vaccine for gonorrhea is yet not available. Due to availability of several host and pathogen genomes and numerous tools for in silico prediction of effective B-cell and T-cell epitopes; recent trend of vaccine designing has been shifted to peptide or epitope based vaccines that are more specific, safe, and easy to produce. In order to design and develop such a peptide vaccine against the pathogen, we adopted a novel computational approach based on sequence, structure, QSAR, and simulation methods along with fold level analysis to predict potential antigenic B-cell epitope derived T-cell epitopes from four vaccine targets of N. gonorrhoeae previously identified by us [Barh and Kumar (2009) In Silico Biology 9, 0019]. Four epitopes, one from each protein, have been designed in such a way that each epitope is highly likely to bind maximum number of HLA molecules (comprising of both the MHC-I and -II) and interacts with most frequent HLA alleles (A*0201, A*0204, B*2705, DRB1*0101, and DRB1*0401) in human population. Therefore our selected epitopes are highly potential to induce both the B-cell and T-cell mediated immune responses. Of course, these selected epitopes require further experimental validation. 

Keywords

gonorrhea, vaccine designing, epitope mapping, antigenicity HLA alleles, immune response

Citation

Barh et al. Bioinformation 5(2): 77-82 (2010)

Edited by

P. Kangueane

ISSN

0973-2063

Publisher

Biomedical Informatics Publishing Group

License

This is an Open Access article which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. This is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License.