ICES: Identification of cytotoxic T lymphocyte epitopes for swine viruses.
Identification of cytotoxic T lymphocyte epitopes on swine viruses: multi-epitope design for universal T cell vaccine
Classical swine fever (CSF), foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) and porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome (PRRS) are the primary diseases affecting the porcine processing industry globally. A vaccine design to elicit a humoral B cell-producing neutralizing antibody response usually lacks broad immunity to various serotypes. In contrast, T-cell inducing vaccines could induce strong and broad responses and thus deserve further attention. Although large panels of synthetic overlapping peptides spanning the entire length of the polyproteins of a virus facilitate the detection of cytotoxic T lymphocyte (CTL) epitopes, it is an exceedingly costly and cumbersome approach. Alternatively, computational predictions have been proven to be of satisfactory accuracy and are easily performed. Such a method enables the systematic identification of genome-wide CTL epitopes by incorporating CTL epitope prediction tools in analyzing large numbers of viral sequences.
In this study, an integrated bioinformatics pipeline has been developed and a web resource for the identification of CTL epitopes of swine viruses has been assembled, which includes the CSF virus (CSFV), FMD virus (FMDV) and PRRS virus (PRRSV) to facilitate vaccine design. Epitopes of cross protections to different subtypes of virus were also identified in this study and may be useful for the development of a universal vaccine against such viral infections among the swine population. The CTL epitopes identified in this study have been in silico evaluated to provide more and wider protection in compared to traditional single-reference vaccine design.
