Identification and design of a multi-epitope subunit vaccine against the opportunistic pathogen Staphylococcus epidermidis: An immunoinformatics approach

Staphylococcus epidermidis is one of the major causes of nosocomial infections around the globe that leads to a high rate of mortality and morbidity in both immunocompromised patients and preterm infants. Despite the alarming increase in multi-drug resistance, no promising vaccines are readily avail...

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Published inJournal of biomolecular structure & dynamics Vol. 40; no. 24; pp. 13859 - 13871
Main Authors Sethi, Guneswar, Varghese, Rinku Polachirakkal, Krishna, Ramadas
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published England Taylor & Francis 01.01.2022
Subjects
Animals
Computational Biology
Epitopes, B-Lymphocyte
Epitopes, T-Lymphocyte
Humans
immunoinformatics
Infant, Newborn
Infant, Premature
MM-PBSA
Molecular Docking Simulation
molecular dynamics
multi-epitope
S. epidermidis
Staphylococcus epidermidis
Vaccines, Subunit
S. epidermidis
MM-PBSA
immunoinformatics
molecular dynamics
multi-epitope
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Summary:Staphylococcus epidermidis is one of the major causes of nosocomial infections around the globe that leads to a high rate of mortality and morbidity in both immunocompromised patients and preterm infants. Despite the alarming increase in multi-drug resistance, no promising vaccines are readily available against this pathogen. Thus, the present study is focused on designing a multi-epitope subunit vaccine using five antigenic proteins of S. epidermidis through an immunoinformatics approach. The final vaccine comprised B-cell, HTL, and CTL binding epitopes followed by Lipoprotein LprA adjuvant added at N-terminal to augment the immunogenicity. Physicochemical assessment of the vaccine reveals the antigenic and non-allergic nature. The vaccine structure was designed, refined, validated, and disulfide engineered to obtain the best model. Molecular docking and dynamics simulation of the proposed vaccine with toll-like receptors (TLR-2 and TLR-4) showed strong and stable interactions. MM-PBSA analysis was implemented as an efficient tool to determine the intermolecular binding free energies of the system. The vaccine was subjected to immune simulation to predict its immunogenic profile. In silico cloning suggested that the proposed vaccine can be expressed efficiently in E.coli. Furthermore, in vivo animal experiment is needed to determine the effectiveness of the in silico designed vaccine. Communicated by Ramaswamy H. Sarma
ISSN:0739-1102
1538-0254
DOI:10.1080/07391102.2021.1997819