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Journal of Structural Biology Mar 2022The antigenic epitope regions of pathogens (e.g., viruses) are recognized by antibodies (Abs) and subsequently cleared by the host immune system, thereby protecting us...
The antigenic epitope regions of pathogens (e.g., viruses) are recognized by antibodies (Abs) and subsequently cleared by the host immune system, thereby protecting us from disease. Some of these epitopes are conserved among different variants or subgroups of pathogens (e.g., Influenza (FLU) viruses, Coronaviruses), hence can be targeted for potential broad-neutralization. Here we report a web-based tool, Epitope Analyzer (EA), that rapidly identifies conformational epitope and paratope residues in an antigen-antibody complex structure. Furthermore, the tool provides the ways and means to analyze broadly neutralizing epitopes by comparing the equivalent epitope residues in similar antigen structures. The similarity in the epitope residues between (multiple) pairs of similar antigen molecules suggest the presence of conserved epitopes that can be targeted by broadly neutralizing antibodies. These details can be used as a guide in developing effective treatments, such as the design of novel vaccines and formulation of cocktail of broadly neutralizing antibodies, against multiple variants or subgroups of viruses. The web application can be freely accessed from the URL, http://viperdb.scripps.edu/ea.php.
Topics: Antibodies, Neutralizing; Broadly Neutralizing Antibodies; Epitopes; Humans; Influenza, Human
PubMed: 35134530
DOI: 10.1016/j.jsb.2022.107839 -
Viruses Nov 2022Outbreaks of monkeypox virus infections have imposed major health concerns worldwide, with high morbidity threats to children and immunocompromised adults. Although...
Outbreaks of monkeypox virus infections have imposed major health concerns worldwide, with high morbidity threats to children and immunocompromised adults. Although repurposed drugs and vaccines are being used to curb the disease, the evolving traits of the virus, exhibiting considerable genetic dynamicity, challenge the limits of a targeted treatment. A pan-genome-based reverse vaccinology approach can provide fast and efficient solutions to resolve persistent inconveniences in experimental vaccine design during an outbreak-exigency. The approach encompassed screening of available monkeypox whole genomes (n = 910) to identify viral targets. From 102 screened viral targets, viral proteins L5L, A28, and L5 were finalized based on their location, solubility, and antigenicity. The potential T-cell and B-cell epitopes were extracted from the proteins using immunoinformatics tools and algorithms. Multiple vaccine constructs were designed by combining the epitopes. Based on immunological properties, chemical stability, and structural quality, a novel multi-epitopic vaccine construct, V4, was finalized. Flexible-docking and coarse-dynamics simulation portrayed that the V4 had high binding affinity towards human HLA-proteins (binding energy < -15.0 kcal/mol) with low conformational fluctuations (<1 Å). Thus, the vaccine construct (V4) may act as an efficient vaccine to induce immunity against monkeypox, which encourages experimental validation and similar approaches against emerging viral infections.
Topics: Child; Humans; Vaccinology; Mpox (monkeypox); Molecular Docking Simulation; Epitopes, B-Lymphocyte; Vaccines
PubMed: 36423113
DOI: 10.3390/v14112504 -
BMC Genomics May 2024Alpha-papillomavirus 9 (α-9) is a member of the human papillomavirus (HPV) α genus, causing 75% invasive cervical cancers worldwide. The purpose of this study was to...
BACKGROUND
Alpha-papillomavirus 9 (α-9) is a member of the human papillomavirus (HPV) α genus, causing 75% invasive cervical cancers worldwide. The purpose of this study was to provide data for effective treatment of HPV-induced cervical lesions in Taizhou by analysing the genetic variation and antigenic epitopes of α-9 HPV E6 and E7.
METHODS
Cervical exfoliated cells were collected for HPV genotyping. Positive samples of the α-9 HPV single type were selected for E6 and E7 gene sequencing. The obtained nucleotide sequences were translated into amino acid sequences (protein primary structure) using MEGA X, and positive selection sites of the amino acid sequences were evaluated using PAML. The secondary and tertiary structures of the E6 and E7 proteins were predicted using PSIPred, SWISS-MODEL, and PyMol. Potential T/B-cell epitopes were predicted by Industrial Engineering Database (IEDB).
RESULTS
From 2012 to 2023, α-9 HPV accounted for 75.0% (7815/10423) of high-risk HPV-positive samples in Taizhou, both alone and in combination with other types. Among these, single-type-positive samples of α-9 HPV were selected, and the entire E6 and E7 genes were sequenced, including 298 HPV16, 149 HPV31, 185 HPV33, 123 HPV35, 325 HPV52, and 199 HPV58 samples. Compared with reference sequences, 34, 12, 10, 2, 17, and 17 nonsynonymous nucleotide mutations were detected in HPV16, 31, 33, 35, 52, and 58, respectively. Among all nonsynonymous nucleotide mutations, 19 positive selection sites were selected, which may have evolutionary significance in rendering α-9 HPV adaptive to its environment. Immunoinformatics predicted 57 potential linear and 59 conformational B-cell epitopes, many of which are also predicted as CTL epitopes.
CONCLUSION
The present study provides almost comprehensive data on the genetic variations, phylogenetics, positive selection sites, and antigenic epitopes of α-9 HPV E6 and E7 in Taizhou, China, which will be helpful for local HPV therapeutic vaccine development.
Topics: Phylogeny; China; Humans; Oncogene Proteins, Viral; Female; Papillomavirus E7 Proteins; Alphapapillomavirus; Epitopes, B-Lymphocyte; Epitopes; Epitopes, T-Lymphocyte; Papillomavirus Infections; Amino Acid Sequence
PubMed: 38778248
DOI: 10.1186/s12864-024-10411-1 -
BMC Bioinformatics Oct 2019The development of accurate epitope prediction tools is important in facilitating disease diagnostics, treatment and vaccine development. The advent of new approaches...
BACKGROUND
The development of accurate epitope prediction tools is important in facilitating disease diagnostics, treatment and vaccine development. The advent of new approaches making use of antibody and TCR sequence information to predict receptor-specific epitopes have the potential to transform the epitope prediction field. Development and validation of these new generation of epitope prediction methods would benefit from regularly updated high-quality receptor-antigen complex datasets.
RESULTS
To address the need for high-quality datasets to benchmark performance of these new generation of receptor-specific epitope prediction tools, a webserver called SCEptRe (Structural Complexes of Epitope-Receptor) was created. SCEptRe extracts weekly updated 3D complexes of antibody-antigen, TCR-pMHC and MHC-ligand from the Immune Epitope Database and clusters them based on antigen, receptor and epitope features to generate benchmark datasets. SCEptRe also provides annotated information such as CDR sequences and VDJ genes on the receptors. Users can generate custom datasets based by selecting thresholds for structural quality and clustering parameters (e.g. resolution, R-free factor, antigen or epitope sequence identity) based on their need.
CONCLUSIONS
SCEptRe provides weekly updated, user-customized comprehensive benchmark datasets of immune receptor-epitope structural complexes. These datasets can be used to develop and benchmark performance of receptor-specific epitope prediction tools in the future. SCEptRe is freely accessible at http://tools.iedb.org/sceptre .
Topics: Antigen-Antibody Complex; Databases, Protein; Epitopes; Humans; Receptors, Immunologic
PubMed: 31601176
DOI: 10.1186/s12859-019-3109-6 -
Nature Communications Apr 2024T cells have the ability to eliminate infected and cancer cells and play an essential role in cancer immunotherapy. T cell activation is elicited by the binding of the T...
T cells have the ability to eliminate infected and cancer cells and play an essential role in cancer immunotherapy. T cell activation is elicited by the binding of the T cell receptor (TCR) to epitopes displayed on MHC molecules, and the TCR specificity is determined by the sequence of its α and β chains. Here, we collect and curate a dataset of 17,715 αβTCRs interacting with dozens of class I and class II epitopes. We use this curated data to develop MixTCRpred, an epitope-specific TCR-epitope interaction predictor. MixTCRpred accurately predicts TCRs recognizing several viral and cancer epitopes. MixTCRpred further provides a useful quality control tool for multiplexed single-cell TCR sequencing assays of epitope-specific T cells and pinpoints a substantial fraction of putative contaminants in public databases. Analysis of epitope-specific dual α T cells demonstrates that MixTCRpred can identify α chains mediating epitope recognition. Applying MixTCRpred to TCR repertoires from COVID-19 patients reveals enrichment of clonotypes predicted to bind an immunodominant SARS-CoV-2 epitope. Overall, MixTCRpred provides a robust tool to predict TCRs interacting with specific epitopes and interpret TCR-sequencing data from both bulk and epitope-specific T cells.
Topics: Humans; T-Lymphocytes; Epitopes; Deep Learning; Immunodominant Epitopes; COVID-19
PubMed: 38615042
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-47461-8 -
Current Opinion in Immunology Aug 2020The recent explosion of atomic-level structures of glycoproteins that comprise the surface antigens of human enveloped viruses, such as RSV, influenza, and HIV, provide... (Review)
Review
The recent explosion of atomic-level structures of glycoproteins that comprise the surface antigens of human enveloped viruses, such as RSV, influenza, and HIV, provide tremendous opportunities for rational, structure-based vaccine design. Several concepts in structure-based vaccine design have been put into practice and are are well along preclinical and clinical implementation. Testing of these designed immunogens will provide key insights into the ability to induce the desired immune responses, namely neutralizing antibodies. Many of these immunogens in human clinical trials represent only the first wave of designs and will likely require continued tweaking and elaboration to achieve the ultimate goal of enhanced breadth and potency. Considerable effort is now being invested in germline targeting, epitope focusing, and improved immune presentation such as multivalent nanoparticle incorporation. This review highlights some of the recent advances in these areas as we prepare for the next generation of immunogens for subsequent rounds of iterative vaccine development.
Topics: Animals; Antigens; Cross Reactions; Epitopes; Germ Cells; Host-Pathogen Interactions; Humans; Models, Animal; Models, Molecular; Mutation; Structure-Activity Relationship; Vaccines; Vaccinology
PubMed: 32387642
DOI: 10.1016/j.coi.2020.03.013 -
HLA Feb 2022The HLA system plays a pivotal role both in transplantation and immunology. While classical HLA genotypes matching is made at the allelic level, recent progresses were...
The HLA system plays a pivotal role both in transplantation and immunology. While classical HLA genotypes matching is made at the allelic level, recent progresses were developed to explore antibody-antigen recognition by studying epitopes. Donor to recipient matching at the epitopic level is becoming a trending topic in the transplantation research field because anti-HLA antibodies are epitope-specific rather than allele-specific. Indeed, different HLA alleles often share common epitopes. We present the HLA-Epi tool (hla.univ-nantes.fr) to study an HLA genotype at the epitope level. Using the international HLA epitope registry (Epregistry.com.br) as a reference, we developed HLA-Epi to easily determine epitopic and allelic compatibility levels between several HLA genotypes. The epitope database covers the most common HLA alleles (N = 2976 HLA alleles), representing more than 99% of the total observed frequency of HLA alleles. The freely accessible web tool HLA-Epi calculates an epitopic mismatch load between different sets of potential recipient-donor pairs at different resolution levels. We have characterized the epitopic mismatches distribution in a cohort of more than 10,000 kidney transplanted pairs from European ancestry, which showed low number of epitopic mismatches: 56.9 incompatibilities on average. HLA-Epi allows the exploration of epitope pairing matching to better understand epitopes contribution to immune responses regulation, particularly during transplantation. This free and ready-to-use bioinformatics tool not only addresses limitations of other related tools, but also offers a cost-efficient and reproducible strategy to analyze HLA epitopes as an alternative to HLA allele compatibility. In the future, this could improve sensitization prevention for allograft allocation decisions and reduce the risk of alloreactivity.
Topics: Alleles; Epitopes; Fluprednisolone; Graft Rejection; HLA Antigens; Histocompatibility Testing; Humans; Isoantibodies
PubMed: 34862850
DOI: 10.1111/tan.14505 -
Journal of Molecular Biology Jun 2011Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) is a major cause of respiratory tract infections in infants, but an effective vaccine has not yet been developed. An ideal vaccine...
Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) is a major cause of respiratory tract infections in infants, but an effective vaccine has not yet been developed. An ideal vaccine would elicit protective antibodies while avoiding virus-specific T-cell responses, which have been implicated in vaccine-enhanced disease with previous RSV vaccines. We propose that heterologous proteins designed to present RSV-neutralizing antibody epitopes and to elicit cognate antibodies have the potential to fulfill these vaccine requirements, as they can be fashioned to be free of viral T-cell epitopes. Here we present the design and characterization of three epitope-scaffolds that present the epitope of motavizumab, a potent neutralizing antibody that binds to a helix-loop-helix motif in the RSV fusion glycoprotein. Two of the epitope-scaffolds could be purified, and one epitope-scaffold based on a Staphylococcus aureus protein A domain bound motavizumab with kinetic and thermodynamic properties consistent with the free epitope-scaffold being stabilized in a conformation that closely resembled the motavizumab-bound state. This epitope-scaffold was well folded as assessed by circular dichroism and isothermal titration calorimetry, and its crystal structure (determined in complex with motavizumab to 1.9 Å resolution) was similar to the computationally designed model, with all hydrogen-bond interactions critical for binding to motavizumab preserved. Immunization of mice with this epitope-scaffold failed to elicit neutralizing antibodies but did elicit sera with F binding activity. The elicitation of F binding antibodies suggests that some of the design criteria for eliciting protective antibodies without virus-specific T-cell responses are being met, but additional optimization of these novel immunogens is required.
Topics: Amino Acid Sequence; Antibodies, Monoclonal; Antibodies, Monoclonal, Humanized; Calorimetry; Cell Line; Circular Dichroism; Epitopes; Humans; Models, Molecular; Molecular Sequence Data; Respiratory Syncytial Viruses; Staphylococcal Protein A
PubMed: 21549714
DOI: 10.1016/j.jmb.2011.04.044 -
Current Drug Discovery Technologies Jun 2014The pharmaceutical industry is experiencing comeback sales growth due in large part to the industry's R&D efforts that center on biologics drug development. To... (Review)
Review
The pharmaceutical industry is experiencing comeback sales growth due in large part to the industry's R&D efforts that center on biologics drug development. To facilitate that effort, tools are being developed for more effective biologic drug development. At the forefront of this effort is epitope characterization, in particular epitope binning, primarily due to the role an epitope plays in drug function. Here we detail the financial advantages of epitope binning including (1) increased R&D productivity due to increased work in process, (2) reduced number of "dead-end"candidates, and (3) increasedability to reengineer antibodies based on the epitope. With the arrival of high throughput biosensors, this manuscript serves as a call to push epitope binning earlier in the biological drug discovery process.
Topics: Biological Factors; Drug Discovery; Epitopes
PubMed: 24266537
DOI: 10.2174/1570163810666131124233827 -
Human Vaccines & Immunotherapeutics Mar 2016Novel vaccination approaches based on rational design of B- and T-cell epitopes - epitope-based vaccines - are making progress in the clinical trial pipeline. The...
Novel vaccination approaches based on rational design of B- and T-cell epitopes - epitope-based vaccines - are making progress in the clinical trial pipeline. The epitope-focused recombinant protein-based malaria vaccine (termed RTS,S) is a next-generation approach that successfully reached phase-III trials, and will potentially become the first commercial vaccine against a human parasitic disease. Progress made on methods such as recombinant DNA technology, advanced cell-culture techniques, immunoinformatics and rational design of immunogens are driving the development of these novel concepts. Synthetic recombinant proteins comprising both B- and T-cell epitopes can be efficiently produced through modern biotechnology and bioprocessing methods, and can enable the induction of large repertoires of immune specificities. In particular, the inclusion of appropriate CD4+ T-cell epitopes is increasingly considered a key vaccine component to elicit robust immune responses, as suggested by results coming from HIV-1 clinical trials. In silico strategies for vaccine design are under active development to address genetic variation in pathogens and several broadly protective "universal" influenza and HIV-1 vaccines are currently at different stages of clinical trials. Other methods focus on improving population coverage in target populations by rationally considering specificity and prevalence of the HLA proteins, though a proof-of-concept in humans has not been demonstrated yet. Overall, we expect immunoinformatics and bioprocessing methods to become a central part of the next-generation epitope-based vaccine development and production process.
Topics: Clinical Trials as Topic; Drug Discovery; Epitopes; Humans; Vaccines, Synthetic
PubMed: 26430814
DOI: 10.1080/21645515.2015.1094595