Immunoinformatics Approach to Design T-cell Epitope-Based Vaccine Against Hendra Virus

Screening of HLA class II epitope-based peptides as potential vaccine candidates is one of the most rational approach for vaccine development against Hendra virus (HeV) infection, for which currently there is no successful vaccine in practice. In this study, screening of epitopes from HeV proteins viz matrix, glycoprotein, nucleocapsid, fusion, C protein, V protein, W protein and polymerase, followed by highest binding affinity & molecular dynamic simulation of selected T-cell epitopes with their corresponding HLA class II alleles has been done. The server ProPred facilitates the binding prediction of HLA class II allele specific epitopes from the antigenic protein sequences of HeV. PEPstrMOD server was used for PDB structure modeling of the screened epitopes and MODELLER was used for HLA alleles modeling. We docked the selected T-cell epitopes with their corresponding HLA allele structures using the AutoDock 4.2 tool. Further the selected docked complex structures were optimized by NAnoscale Molecular Dynamics program (NAMD) at 5 ps, with the CHARMM-22 force field parameter incorporated in Visual Molecular Dynamics (VMD 1.9.2) and complex structure stability was evaluated by calculating RMSD values. Epitopes IRIFVPATN (Nucleocapsid), MRNLLSQSL (Nucleocapsid), VRRAGKYYS (Matrix) and VRLKCLLCG (Fusion) proteins have shown considerable binding with DRB1*0806, DRB1*1304, DRB1*0701 and DRB1*0301 HLA class II allele respectively. Toxicity, antigenicity and population coverage of epitopes IRIFVPATN, MRNLLSQSL, VRRAGKYYS and VRLKCLLCG were analyzed by Toxin Pred, Vexijen and IEDB tool, respectively. The potential T-cell epitopes can be utilized in designing comprehensive epitope-based vaccines and diagnostic kits against Hendra virus after further in-vivo studies.