Designing a Novel Multi-epitope Peptide Vaccine Against Leishmania infantum Based Bioinformatics Approaches

Designing a Novel Multi-epitope Peptide Vaccine Against Leishmania infantum Based Bioinformatics Approaches

Kala-azar or visceral leishmaniasis (VL) is most important vector-borne protozoan disease and a life threatening problem in globe due to the lack of ideal drugs or vaccines. Recent advances in immunoinformatics and bioinformatics could be promising approach in designing the efficient recombinant vaccine for VL treatment. In this study, an efficient multi-epitope vaccine against Leishmania infantum designed by computational method and Gp63, Hsp70 and Kmp11 antigens from Leishmania infantum were selected as potential immunodominant epitopes. RpfE and RpfB from Mycobacterium tuberculosis used as adjuvants for enhance vaccine immunogenicity. bioinformatic tools were used to analyze different aspects of designed vaccine. Materials and methods: Multi-epitope vaccine designed by using several step methodology. The overall procedures used for recombinant vaccine design, antigenic proteins and TLR-4 agonists were selected. Then, epitopes that stimulates B-cells and T-cells were derived from the antigenic peptides. Appropriate amino acid linkers were used for joining the selected epitopes and TLR4 agonists. After selection and joining epitopes and adjuvants, different immunoinformatics servers were used for evaluation of the peptide construct. At the end, protein sequence was translated to DNA sequence and optimized for cloning and expressions in E. coli host. Results: the polytopic construction was designed by assembling the selected epitopes and connecting them with linkers. our in silico results showed that the designed vaccine efficiently stimulate immune system and has conformational stability. Conclusion: Using immunoinformatic tools, we predicted the characteristics of three genes of Leishmania infantum parasite as fused potent vaccine candidate.