Designing a multi-epitope candidate vaccine by employing immunoinformatics approaches to control African swine fever spread

Abstract

The African swine fever virus has been circulating for decades and is highly infectious, often fatal to farmed and wild pigs. There is currently no approved vaccine or treatment for the disease, making prevention even more difficult. Therefore, vaccine development is necessary and urgent to limit the consequences of ASF and ensure the food chain and sustainability of the swine industry. This research study was conducted to design a multi-epitope vaccine for controlling veterinary diseases caused by the African swine fever virus. We employed the immunoinformatics approaches to reveal 37 epitopes from different viral proteins of ASFV. These epitopes were linked to adjuvants and linkers to form a full-fledged immunogenic vaccine construct. The tertiary structure of the final vaccine was predicted using a deep-learning approach. The molecular docking and molecular dynamics predicted stable interactions between the vaccine and immune receptor TLR5 of Sus scrofa (Pig). The MD simulation studies reflect that the calculated parameters like RMSD, RMSF, number of hydrogen bonds, and finally, the buried interface surface area for the complex remained stable throughout the simulation time. This analysis suggests the stability of interface interactions between the TLR5 and the multi-epitope vaccine construct. Further, the physiochemical analysis demonstrated that our designed vaccine construct was expected to have high stability and prolonged half-life time in mammalian cells. Traditional vaccine design experiments require significant time and financial input from the development stage to the final product. Studies like this can assist in accelerating vaccine development while minimizing the cost.

Communicated by Ramaswamy H. Sarma

Keywords:

• African swine fever virus (ASFV)
• immunoinformatics
• multi-epitope vaccine
• vaccine design
• in silico cloning

Authors’ contributions

Conceptualization: TLN; Methodology: TLN, JSLM, ARS and KC; Formal analysis and investigation: TLN; Writing—original draft preparation: TLN; Writing—review and editing: TLN, VL, YL, JSLM and ARS; Supervision: HK. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No financial conflict of interest exists in relation to the work described.

Consent to participate

All authors have given their consent to participate in this work.

Consent for publication

All authors have given their consent to publish this work.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the BK21 FOUR Program of the Department of Agricultural Biotechnology, Seoul National University, Seoul, Republic of Korea. This work was also partially financially supported by the Office of the Ministry of Higher Education, Science, Research and Innovation; and the Thailand Science Research and Innovation through the Kasetsart University Reinventing University Program 2022.