Immunoinformatics-Driven Design Of A Multi-Epitiope Vaccine Against SARS-Cov-2 Variants

Abstract

To secure a multi-epitope vaccine against conserved peptides of SARS-CoV-2 spike protein and assess 1,500+ variant sequences (2020-2022), the software of immunoinformatics was used in this paper. The workflow had identified 12 high-affinity epitopes (IC50 < 50 nM) which covered 95.2 percent of the population containing 7 CTL (MHC-I binding) and 5 HTL (MHC-II binding) epitopes. Epitptides were modified to form epitopes, and a product having a molecular weight of 50.2 kDa and pI of 7.8 was obtained which contained 459 amino acids. Molecular docking predicted binding to TLR4 ( -12.4 kcal/mol) and MHC alleles in silico cloning and expression studies had predicted a 98.5 percent codon adaptation index in E. coli. Strong IgG/IgM titers (10⁵ ) and Th₁/Th₁₇ could be predicted by Immune simulation (C-ImmSim). The population analysis covered analysis indicated that 92.3 per cent of the world population was covered and over 90 per cent of the population in the Asian, European and African populations was covered. The vaccine construct was desirable in terms of physicochemical properties (instability index: 31.4, aliphatic index: 85.2) and antigenicity ( VaxiJen score: 0.76).