Abstract
Plasmodium falciparum the agent of malignant form of malaria and in particularly its ability to generate mutant variants makes it a successful pathogen. Due to the increasing drug resistance problem, an effective malaria vaccine is highly desirable. Peptide based vaccine can also be utilized to control malaria but HLA polymorphism is major hurdle in development of peptide based vaccine. Nevertheless promiscuous peptides which have potential to bind with more than one HLA alleles can be utilized to develop vaccine against malaria. Identification of an appropriate T-cell epitope for activation of immune system is of great importance before a strategy for development or trial of malaria vaccine is formulated. In the present study five different in silico tools were employed to predict promiscuous peptides by using protein sequence of promoter region of Pfs-25 gene. A total 303 peptides were predicted and by adopting different selection criteria’s only 4 peptides were selected for 3D homology modelling. The constructed 3D models of promiscuous peptides and HLA-alleles were further utilized to test for their binding affinity towards HLA alleles by means of peptide protein docking analysis. Docking analysis of these four potential vaccine candidate epitopes revealed that the promiscuous peptide P9 (FLCFLQFIHFFRYLF) showed highest docking affinity with all HLA-alleles and this epitopic region may be utilize as potential vaccine candidate antigen for development of peptide based vaccine against P. falciparum.
Citation
Khan N, Farooq U, Chauhan S, Khan A, Khan A (2019) Protein Modelling and Binding Analysis of HLA-DR Promiscuous T cell Epitopes from Pfs-25 Ookinete Surface Antigen. SM J Bioinform Proteomics 3: 11.