In silico proposition to predict cluster of B- and T-cell epitopes for the usefulness of vaccine design from invasive, virulent and membrane associated proteins of C. jejuni.

Purpose: Campylobacter jejuni is the one of the leading causes of bacterial diarrheal illness worldwide. This study aims to design specific epitopes for the utility of designing peptide vaccine(s) against C. jejuni by targeting invasive, virulent and membrane associated proteins like FlaA, Cia, CadF, PEB1, PEB3 and MOMP.

Methods: In the present study, various immunoinformatics approaches have been applied to design a potential epitope based vaccine against C. jejuni. The tools include Bepipred, ABCpred, Immune Epitope databse (IEDB) resource portal, Autodock vina etc.

Results: Peptides "EINKN", "TGSRLN", "KSNPDI", "LDENGCE" respectively from FlaA, MOMP, PEB3, CadF proteins were found to be the most potential B cell epitopes while peptides "FRINTNVAA", "NYFEGNLDM", "YKYSPKLNF", "YQDAIGLLV", "FRNNIVAFV" and "LIMPVFHEL" respectively from Fla, CadF, MOMP, PEB1A, PEB3 and Cia might elicit cell mediated immunity and "IFYTTGSRL" from MOMP protein might elicit both humoral and cell-mediated immunity. All these potential peptidic epitopes showed almost 80-100 % conservancy in different strains of C jejuni with varying proportions of population coverage ranging from 22-60 %. Further authentication of these peptide epitopes as probable vaccine candidate was mediated by their binding to specific HLA alleles using in silico docking technique.

Conclusion: Based on the present study, it could be concluded that these predicted epitopes might be used to design a vaccine against C. jejuni bacteria and thus, could be validated in model hosts to verify their efficacy as vaccine.