An in silico Approach for Epitope Based Vaccine Design Against Ebola virus

Author(s): Smrithi Radhakrishnan, M. Elizabeth Sobhia

Ebola viral disease remains a great threat to the society due to the limited availability of licensed drugs or vaccines. As the pathogen belongs to Biosafety Level 4, it is extremely dangerous to design a vaccine using conventional techniques. Therefore, reverse vaccinology approach is used to select the suitable epitopes from the genomic sequence of the virus. Using several algorithms, specific epitopes were chosen and 3D structures were obtained. The HLA alleles vary in different population and hence those alleles that commonly occur in African and world population were selected. Homology models were built for those HLA alleles whose 3D structures were unavailable. Then selected 20 epitopes were docked with selected 8 HLAs and further, selected epitope NQDGLICGL was validated by molecular dynamics study.