Viruses, Vol. 13, Pages 2360: In Silico Identification of Chikungunya Virus B- and T-Cell Epitopes with High Antigenic Potential for Vaccine Development

Viruses, Vol. 13, Pages 2360: In Silico Identification of Chikungunya Virus B- and T-Cell Epitopes with High Antigenic Potential for Vaccine Development Viruses doi: 10.3390/v13122360 Authors: Gilma G. Sánchez-Burgos Nallely M. Montalvo-Marin Edgar R. Díaz-Rosado Ernesto Pérez-Rueda Reverse vaccinology is an outstanding strategy to identify antigens with high potential for vaccine development. Different parameters of five prediction programs were used to assess their sensitivity and specificity to identify B-cell epitopes of Chikungunya virus (CHIKV) strains reported in the IEDB database. The results, based on the use of 15 to 20 mer epitopes and the polyproteins to which they belong, were compared to establish the best parameters to optimize the prediction of antigenic peptides of the Mexican strain CHIKV AJV21562.1. LBtope showed the highest specificity when we used the reported epitopes and polyproteins but the worst sensitivity with polyproteins; ABCpred had similar specificity to LBtope only with the epitopes reported and showed moderate specificity when we used polyproteins for the predictions. Because LBtope was more reliable in predicting true epitopes, it was used as a reference program to predict and select six novel epitopes of the Mexican strain of CHIKV according to prediction frequency, viral genome localization, and non-homology with the human proteome. On the other hand, six bioinformatics programs were used with default parameters to predict ...
Source: Viruses - Category: Virology Authors: Tags: Article Source Type: research