In silico Epitope Prediction and Immunogenic Analysis for Penton base Epitope-focused Vaccine against Hydropericardium syndrome in chicken

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articlepeer-review

  • Faiza Aziz
  • Soban Tufail
  • Majid Ali Shah
  • Muhammad Salahuddin Shah
  • Mudasser Habib
  • Mirza, Osman Asghar
  • Mazhar Iqbal
  • Moazur Rahman

Certain strains of fowl adenovirus serotype 4 (FAdV-4) of the family Adenoviridae are recognized to be the causative agents of Hydropericardium Syndrome (HPS) in broiler chicken. Despite the significantly spiking mortality in broilers due to HPS, not much effort has been made to design an effective vaccine against FAdV-4. The combination of immuno- and bio-informatics tools for immunogenic epitope prediction is the most recent concept of vaccine design. It reduces the time and effort required for hunting a potent vaccine candidate and is economical. Previously, we have reported the penton base protein of FAdV-4 to be a candidate for subunit vaccine against HPS. And in the present study, we have computationally pre-screened promising B- and T-cell epitopes of the penton base. Multiple methods were employed for linear B-cell epitope identification; BepiPred and five other methods based on physicochemical properties of the amino acids. The penton base was homology modeled by means of Modeller 9.17 and after refinement of the model (by GalaxyRefine web server) ElliPro web tool was used to predict the discontinuous epitopes. NetMHCcons 1.1 and NetMHCIIpan 3.1 servers were used for the likelihood of peptide binding to Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC) class I & II molecules respectively for T-cell epitope forecast. As a result, we identified the peptide stretch of 1-225 as the most promiscuous B- and T-cell epitope region in penton base Full Length (FL) protein sequence. Escherichia coli based expression vectors were generated containing cloned peptide stretch 1-225 (penton base1-225) and penton base FL gene sequence. The recombinant penton base1-225 and penton base FL proteins were expressed and purified using Escherichia coli-based expression system. Purification yield of penton base1-225 was 3-fold higher compared to penton base FL. These proteins were injected in chickens to determine their competence in protection against HPS. The results showed equal protection level of the two proteins and commercial inactivated vaccine against FAdV-4 infection. The results suggest the peptide stretch 1-225 of penton base as a valuable candidate for developing an epitope-driven vaccine to combat HPS.

Original languageEnglish
Article number197750
JournalVirus Research
ISSN0168-1702
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2019

Bibliographical note

Copyright © 2019. Published by Elsevier B.V.

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