A multivalent DNA vaccine against group A human rotavirus: An in silico investigation

Abstract

Gastroenteritis due to single rotavirus causes huge economic loss annually. Severity of rotaviral diarrhoea among children is primarily manifested by different combinations of G and P types. Rotavirus surveillance studies resulted in two ambitious globally licensed vaccine namely, Rotarix and RotaTaq and a few other. However, post-vaccination surveillance studies indicate, vaccine failure and other complications such as intussusception, environmental enteric dysfunction, etc. Herein, we design a multivalent DNA vaccine against rotavirus and tested its efficiency by using in silico tools. Two main neutralizing rotaviral antigens i.e, VP7 and VP8 were taken into account and respectively 390, 450 known sequences of different serogroup have been analyzed to obtain a consensus sequence for epitope prediction. Epitopes specific for MHC-I and -II were predicted using IEDB and chosen based on their best IC50 value and CPR. A good binding profile with a monoclonal antibody specific for B-cell antigens is displayed by all epitopes they were found to be non-allergenic in the human host. Ethnic specificity of the epitopes is also within acceptable range except for South African and Central American populations. We use pBI-CMV1 bidirectional mammalian expression vector to design the DNA vaccine, where we stapled manually integrated epitopes for VP7 and VP8 at MCS1 and 2 respectively. In conclusion, this study provides a new set of data for a new DNA vaccine against rotavirus.