Identification of Novel Vaccine Candidates against Yellow Fever Virus from the Envelope Protein: An Insilico Approach

Objectives: Yellow fever virus (YFV) is an enveloped positive sense RNA virus. It is the causative agent of the mosquito-borne disease yellow fever. The aim of this study was to design multi epitopes vaccine for YFV from envelope protein eliciting humoral and cellular immunity. Methods: Twenty six YFV strains envelope proteins were retrieved from NCBI. The immune epitope database analysis resources (IEDB) were used for epitopes prediction. Results: Eleven epitopes successfully passed all B cell prediction tools, among them four epitopes 33VMAPDKPSL41, 72DKCP77, 236PPHA239 and 385LTYQ388 demonstrated higher score in Emini and Kolaskar and tongaonker software. Thus were proposed as B cells epitopes. For T cells; 28 epitopes interacted with MHC-I and the best recognizable epitopes were 471MTMSMSMIL479, 363VLIEVNPPF371, 33VMAPDKPSL41 and 226REMHHLVEF234. For MHC-II ninety epitopes were predicted and the best epitopes were 284RVKLSALTL292, 363VLIEVNPPF371, 479LVGVIMMFL487 and 226REMHHLVEF234. Strikingly the epitope 33VMAPDKPSL41 successfully interacted with both B and T cells. Also 363VLIEVNPPF371 and 226REMHHLVEF234 demonstrated successful interaction with T cells. The population coverage was 84.66% and 99.91% for MHC-I and MHC-II epitopes, respectively, and 99.99% for all T cells epitopes. Conclusions: Taken together nine epitopes successfully proposed as vaccine candidate against YFV. In vivo and in vitro clinical trials studies are required to elucidate the effectiveness of these epitopes as vaccine. J Microbiol Infect Dis 2020; 10(1):31-46.