A novel strategy of epitope design in Neisseria gonorrhoeae

In spite of genome sequences of both human and N. gonorrhoeae in hand, vaccine for gonorrhea is yet not available. Due to availability of several host and pathogen genomes and numerous tools for in silico prediction of effective B-cell and T-cell epitopes; recent trend of vaccine designing has been shifted to peptide or epitope based vaccines that are more specific, safe, and easy to produce. In order to design and develop such a peptide vaccine against the pathogen, we adopted a novel computational approach based on sequence, structure, QSAR, and simulation methods along with fold level analysis to predict potential antigenic B-cell epitope derived T-cell epitopes from four vaccine targets of N. gonorrhoeae previously identified by us [Barh and Kumar (2009) In Silico Biology 9, 1-7]. Four epitopes, one from each protein, have been designed in such a way that each epitope is highly likely to bind maximum number of HLA molecules (comprising of both the MHC-I and II) and interacts with most frequent HLA alleles (A*0201, A*0204, B*2705, DRB1*0101, and DRB1*0401) in human population. Therefore our selected epitopes are highly potential to induce both the B-cell and T-cell mediated immune responses. Of course, these selected epitopes require further experimental validation.