Epitopic mining on Spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 as a candidate target for
vaccine design: An in-silico analysis
Abstract
The outbreak of novel SARS-CoV-2 virion has wreaked havoc with a high
prevalence of respiratory illness and high transmission due to a vague
understanding of the viral antigenicity augmenting dire challenge to
public health globally. This viral member requisite the expansion of
diagnostic and therapeutic tools to track its transmission and confront
through vaccine development. Therefore, prophylactic strategies are
mandatory. Virulence-related spike proteins can be the desirable
candidate befitting computational design of vaccines targeting
SARS-CoV-2 followed by meteoric development of immune epitopes. This
study aims to characterize Spike protein using the existing knowledge
related to the immunological profile of SARS-CoV-2 to predict
immunogenic epitopes based on antigenicity, allergenicity, toxicity,
immunogenicity, and population coverage. Applying in-silico approaches,
a set of twenty-four B lymphocyte-based epitopes and forty-six T
lymphocyte-based epitopes (MHC-I and MHC-II) were selected. The
predicted epitopes were evaluated for their intrinsic properties.
Physico-chemical characterization of epitopes qualify them for further
in vitro and in vivo analysis pre-requisite vaccine
development. This study presents a set of screened epitopes that binds
to the HLA- specific allelic proteins that can be employed for designing
a multi-epitopic peptide vaccine construct (MEPVC) against SARS-CoV-2
that will confer vaccine-induced protective immunity due to its
structural stability.