Designing of a multi-epitope vaccine candidate againstCampylobacter jejuni based on bioinformatics study

Background and Aim : Campylobacter species are widely distributed globally. Campylobacterjejuni is a Gram-negative bacteria that causes complicated diarrhea worldwide. Owing to the lackof effective vaccine against C. jejuni till now, the best way for reducing the C. jejuni infectionsincludes developing protective vaccine for human use. Application of in silico studies for thedesign of vaccine candidate reduces the time duration and costs of the workflow. CadF, FlpA,Peb۱A, FlaA, CiaA and Ftsk are the most important structural and non-structural proteins in thepathogenesis of this bacterium. Accordingly, the aim of this work was performing a bioinformaticsstudy to design a multi-epitope-based protein subunit vaccine candidate.Methods : Primary epitopes were selected using NCBI from a set of bacterial protein structuresthen the potential of peptide sequences in immune responding was evaluated and antigenic, nonallergenicand non-toxigenic epitopes were predicted using VaxiJen ۲.۰, AllerTOP, and ToxinPredservers. In the next step, the non-allergenic and non-toxic epitopes were selected and these adoptedepitopes were linked to each other using appropriate linkers, followed by appending a suitableadjuvant (toll-like receptor ۴ agonist) to increase the immunogenicity of the multi-epitope vaccine.Results : The vaccine candidate was able to provoke sufficient responses of T cells and B cellsand Gamma-interferon which are pivotal for the antibacterial responses of the immune system.Conclusion : Therefore, it seems that our multi-epitope vaccine candidate was appropriate andhad high potential for experimental analysis and was proven to be useful against C. jejuni infectionas a concerning cause of diarrhea.

کلیدواژه ها:

Campylobacter jejuni ، diarrhea ، vaccine ، CadF ، FlpA ، Peb۱A ، FlaA ، CiaA ، Ftsk ، bioinformatics