Abstract
Introduction: Coccidiosis is an essential type of disease which is responsible for infection all around the world. The mentioned disease is caused by Eimeria which has determinable characteristics including intestinal injury, diarrhea, or bloody stools. Despite the using specific drugs for this disease, a lot of issues like the onset of drug-resistance and raised treatment costs made the drug mediated method challenging. The present in silico investigation was done to reveal biophysical properties and immunogenic epitopes of six ROPs proteins for rational vaccine design in future.
Materials and methods: We utilized different online tools in order to predict characteristics like allergenicity, antigenicity, physicochemical properties, solubility, post-translational modification sites (PTMs), the presence of signal peptide and transmembrane domains. In addition, the secondary and tertiary structures of the assessed proteins were drawn through the refinement process and validation. At last, we utilized NetCTL server as a prediction tool for cytotoxic T lymphocyte (CTL) epitopes. After the mentioned process, immunogenicity was analyzed. IEDB server was chosen as a prediction tool for helper T-lymphocyte (HTL) epitopes. After the mentioned process, we assessed antigenicity and IFN-γ and IL-4 induction.
Results: We could find many different linear B-cell epitopes with ability to be antigenic. They also had good water solubility, and they didn't have allergenicity. Thus, these proteins had proper antigenicity, and they had many different PTMs. They also had different HTL, CTL, and B-cell epitopes. We can use these results to develop a proper kind of multi-epitope vaccine for therapeutic purposes.
Conclusion: According to the present study, it might be promising to focus on specific regions of the parasite’s protein rather than large protein residues, as this might contribute to the reduction of the parasite’s antigen complexity.