Computational analysis of immunogenic epitopes in the p30 and p54 proteins of African swine fever virus

Abstract

African swine fever (ASF) is a highly infectious viral disease of pigs, which causes acute fatal haemorrhage and is a severe concern to the global pork industry. The present study followed computational approaches to identify B- and T-cell epitopes for the p30 and p54 proteins of the African swine fever virus (ASFV) by interacting with the swine leukocyte antigen (SLA) alleles. The amino acid sequences of p30 and p54 were analysed for variability and relative solvent accessibility, and their three-dimensional structures were predicted and validated. Molecular dynamics simulation was performed to study the structural and dynamic properties of the protein. Six and five linear B-cell epitopes have been predicted for p30 and p54, respectively. Four and three discontinuous B-cell epitopes have been predicted for p30 and p54, respectively. Further, the top five T-cell epitopes for SLA-1, 2, and 3 have been listed for both proteins. These results can help us to understand the immunodominant regions in the p30 and p54 proteins of ASFV and potentially assist in designing peptide-based diagnostics and vaccines. Also, the identified T-cell epitopes may be considered for peptide-based vaccine design against ASFV.

Communicated by Ramaswamy H. Sarma

Keywords:

• African swine fever virus
• p30
• p54
• structure modelling
• epitopes

Disclosure statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Additional information

Funding

The virus research in our laboratory is currently supported by the Department of Biotechnology, India (BT/PR24308/NER/95/644/2017 and BT/PR41246/NER/95/1685/2020) and the Department of Health Research, Government of India (NER/71/2020-ECD-I).