Insilico Prediction of B-Cell and T-Cell Epitopes for Chaperones from Mycobacterium tuberculosis

With Mycobacterium tuberculosis control becoming a global necessity and history of causing more death than HIV in 2015 crucial consideration is to be given to create an effective vaccine to cope up with the multi-drug resistant forms of M. tuberculosis. The only licensed TB vaccine Bacillus Calmette-Gurin (BCG) has drawbacks that limit its efficacy and applicability for which alternate approaches like peptide or epitope based vaccine that can offer safe and specific immune response without any cross reactivity also offering easy production except for an obstacle that for designing peptide vaccines a potential candidate selection from the hundreds or thousands of potential candidates in which many number of epitopes might be present in an antigenic protein but all may not antigenic and does not involve in immune response too. In the present study, two protein fimC and papD were selected. Antigenicity, B-cell and T-cell epitopes of these proteins were identified using Vaxijen, BCPred, ProPred I, ProPred. Binding affinty of the predicted epitope with MHC/HLA alleles were calculated using MHC Pred. Surface exposed epitope may be effectively involved in immune response which is predicted by PSORTb tool. Good binding epitopes were selected based on IC50 value against DRB1*0101 and DRB1*0401 allele. The finally selected potential epitopes are IRVNNTSPY, YRPAGLSDR from fimC and one epitope LGSAPVLGY from papD. This study suggested that the predicted epitopes can elicit both B-Cell and T-cell mediated immune response, however experimental validation are required.