In silico drug designing against Klebsiella pneumoniae adhesin protein

Abstract

Klebsiella pneumoniae, is one of the causative agents of many nosocomial infections. In spite of having a plethora of information on the virulent factors of this bacteria, no definite vaccines have yet been designed or developed in order to prevent the infections caused by the multidrug resistant pathogen. Hence, taking this in account, the present study designed an in silico peptide vaccine against K. pneumoniae, by predicting both B-cell and T-cell epitopes which is followed by molecular docking. In this study, peptide sequences of Type 1 fimbrial adhesin protein of 28 strains of K. pneumoniae were retrieved and then tested by in silico methods to identify the conserved antigenic portions, present in all the 28 strains of the pathogen. VTLQRGSAY and IYDSRTDKPW were found to be the most potential T-cell and B-cell epitope, among all the other antigenic portions. Furthermore, the T-cell epitope VTLQRGSAY, when docked with HLA-A protein, fitted perfectly inside the groove of it. These results prove that the designed epitopes could be a potent candidate for vaccine development against K. pneumoniae.