In Silico Epitope based peptide vaccine designing against yellow fever virus

Abstract

The most widely used vaccine for treatment of Yellow Fever patients is YF 17D. It is a live attenuated vaccine derived from Asibi strain. It is administered widely to patients throughout the world but it has few problems such as low immune response and it may cause allergic reactions. The aim of this study is todesign an epitope-based peptide vaccine by targeting E protein of Yellow Fever Virus which may induce a stronger immune response.30 sequences of E protein of Yellow Fever Virus strainswere retrieved from NCBI database. E protein was found to be mostly conserved among all the sequences with little variability. Our conserved E region was found to be a probable antigen with a value of 0.4588 in Vaxijen sever.4 epitopes were found to be common in BepiPred and BCPREDS. Three of those epitopes were found to be antigenic. A peptide VKNPTDTGHGT were predicted to have surface accessibility. So the whole epitope VKNPTDTGHGTwas taken for analyzing conservancy and was found to be 96.67% conserved in all sequences. VKNPTDTGHGTepitope also possesses flexibility and accessibility as most of the residues of the peptide were found above the threshold level. Here we suggest in vivo study of our novel peptide antigen in E protein for universal vaccine which may be used to prevent Yellow Fever virus.