HHV-5 epitope: A potential vaccine candidate with high antigenicity and large coverage

Abstract

Outbreak of Human Herpes virus-5 (HHV-5) infection in emerging countries has raised worldwide health concern owing to prevalence of congenital impairments and life threatening consequences in immunocompromised individuals. Thus, there lies an impending need to develop vaccine against HHV-5. HHV-5 enters into host cells with the help of necessary components glycoprotein B (gB) and H/L. In this study, the conformational linear B-cell and T-cell epitopes for gB of HHV-5 have been predicted using conformational approaches, for their possible collective use as vaccine candidates. We examined epitope’s interactions with major histocompatibility complexes using molecular docking and also investigated their stable binding with specific toll like receptor-2 (TLR2), present on host cells during HHV-5 infection. Predicted MHC-I epitope ‘LVAIAVVII’ with high antigenicity and large coverage of HLA alleles was found to superimpose on MHC-II epitope (Rank 1) and was also identified to be the core sequence of putative B cell epitope ‘ILVAIAVVIITYLI’. Resulting epitope was found to have consistent interaction with TLR2 during long term (100 ns) MD run. We also validated this nonamer epitope for its dissimilarity with human genome and high population coverage, suggesting it to be a potential vaccine candidate with higher coverage for both the MHC alleles of Indian population.

Communicated by Ramaswamy H. Sarma

Keywords:

• Human herpes virus
• glycoprotein B
• B-cell and T-cell epitopes
• antigenicity
• vaccine

Acknowledgments

Neeraj Kumar would like to thank Delhi University for providing essential support. Abhinav Grover is thankful to Jawaharlal Nehru University for usage of all computational facilities. Abhinav Grover is grateful to University Grants Commission, India for the Faculty Recharge position. Aditi Singh acknowledges Department of Health Research (DHR) for young scientist fellowship.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.