Epitope-based peptide vaccine against Bombali Ebolavirus viral protein 40: An immunoinformatics combined with molecular docking studies

Abstract

Bombali Ebolavirus belongs to the RNA group of viruses which causes lethal hemorrhagic fever with a high mortality rate. Despite these facts, yet there is no approved vaccine have been developed for the eradication of Bombali Ebolavirus infections. Therefore, this study described a multi epitope-based peptide vaccine against Bombali Ebolavirus VP40, using several immunoinformatics tools combined with molecular docking studies. The VP40 sequences of the sixty-six Ebolavirus strains were retrieved from National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) and Uniprot, and then submitted to VaxiJen for identification of the most antigenic protein. B-cell and T-cell prediction, population coverage and molecular docking analysis were achieved to determine the most promising Bombali VP40 epitopes. The VP40 (YP_009513276.1) of Bombali Ebola virus was found to be the most antigenic protein among all the analyzed ones, and thus selected for the further predictions. For T cell prediction, two epitopes showed high affinity to MHC class I with high population coverage against Africa and the world. Furthermore, in MHC class II, three promising epitopes were found associated with most common MHC class II alleles. The above results indicate that these peptides capable of provoking T-cell response and being interacted with a wide range of HLA molecules that suggested a strong potential for a vaccine candidate against Bombali Ebolavirus.

Keywords

• Bombali ebolavirus
• Matrix protein
• Viral protein (VP40)
• Vaccine design
• Immunoinformatics