Immunoinformatics: Screening of potential T cell antigenic determinants in proteome of H1N1 swine influenza virus for virus epitope vaccine design

Abstract

Influenza (H1N1) is a highly contagious respiratory pathogen that continues to evolve and threaten both veterinary and human public health. Presently existing vaccines against influenza (H1N1) are based on the generation of secondary response in form of neutralizing antibody primarily directed against surface proteins-hemagglutinin and neuraminidase. In this work, Propred and Propred I immunoinformatics tools have been used to predict the T cell epitopes from seven putative protein viz. Hemagglutinin, neuraminidase, polymerase PA, nucleocapsid protein, matrix protein, polymerase PB1, polymerase PB2 of influenza virus A/Minnesota/2009 (H1N1). Total of 15 epitopes were predicted for HLA class I and 14 epitopes for HLA class II molecules. These epitopes are found top scoring peptides and showed binding with maximum number of HLA alleles. The threshold percent taken in this analysis was 4% to select high affinity peptides by Propred and Propred I. The predicted epitopes may be served as a useful diagnostic reagent for evaluating T-cell responses in the context of natural infection and also might be helpful for designing of either a DNA vaccine or a subunit vaccine against H1N1 influenza. © 2010 Sharma P, et al.