Employing computational tools to design a multi-epitope vaccine targeting human immunodeficiency virus-1 (HIV-1)

BMC Genomics

Research

Hasnain Javed¹  Hamza Sher²  Hafsa Sharif²  Aneela Javed²  Tahreem Zaheer²  Amjad Ali²  Sarmad Ahmad Khan³ 

[1] Advanced Diagnostic Lab BSL-3, Punjab AIDS Control Program, Primary and Secondary Healthcare Department, Government of the Punjab, Lahore, Pakistan;Atta Ur Rahman School of Applied Biosciences, National University of Sciences and Technology, Islamabad, Pakistan;German Cancer Research Center (DFKZ), German Cancer Research Consortium (DKTK), Heidelberg, Germany;

关键词: Immuno-informatics;    Computational biology;    Human immunodeficiency virus;    Immunity;    Vaccinology;    Acquired immunodeficiency syndrome;    Bioinformatics;    Toll like receptor-3;   

DOI  :  10.1186/s12864-023-09330-4

 received in 2022-10-19, accepted in 2023-04-24,  发布年份 2023

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundDespite being in the 21st century, the world has still not been able to vanquish the global AIDS epidemic, and the only foreseeable solution seems to be a safe and effective vaccine. Unfortunately, vaccine trials so far have returned unfruitful results, possibly due to their inability to induce effective cellular, humoral and innate immune responses. The current study aims to tackle these limitations and propose the desired vaccine utilizing immunoinformatic approaches that have returned promising results in designing vaccines against various rapidly mutating organisms. For this, all polyprotein and protein sequences of HIV-1 were retrieved from the LANL (Los Alamos National Laboratory) database. The consensus sequence was generated after alignment and used to predict epitopes. Conserved, antigenic, non-allergenic, T-cell inducing, B-cell inducing, IFN-ɣ inducing, non-human homologous epitopes were selected and combined to propose two vaccine constructs i.e., HIV-1a (without adjuvant) and HIV-1b (with adjuvant).ResultsHIV-1a and HIV-1b were subjected to antigenicity, allergenicity, structural quality analysis, immune simulations, and MD (molecular dynamics) simulations. Both proposed multi-epitope vaccines were found to be antigenic, non-allergenic, stable, and induce cellular, humoral, and innate immune responses. TLR-3 docking and in-silico cloning of both constructs were also performed.ConclusionOur results indicate HIV-1b to be more promising than HIV-1a; experimental validations can confirm the efficacy and safety of both constructs and in-vivo efficacy in animal models.Graphical Abstract

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© The Author(s) 2023

【 图 表 】

41116_2023_36_Article_IEq40.gif

41116_2023_36_Article_IEq16.gif

40517_2023_256_Article_IEq139.gif

Fig. 2

Fig. 5

40517_2023_256_Article_IEq51.gif

40517_2023_256_Article_IEq34.gif

Fig. 1

40517_2023_258_Article_IEq113.gif

41116_2023_36_Article_IEq813.gif