Title

Authors

Affiliation

¹Centre of Excellence in Molecular Biology, University of the Punjab, Lahore, Pakistan; ²Department of Poultry Science, University of Agriculture Faisalabad, Pakistan.

Email

abida_ravian@hotmail.com; *Corresponding author

Article Type

Hypothesis

Date

Received February 09, 2012; Accepted February 13, 2012; Published October 13, 2012

Hepatitis C is the major health problem over the globe affecting approximately 200 million people worldwide and about 10 million Pakistani populations. Developing countries are especially facing the problems of HCV infection. Hence the goal of the study was to find out the antigenic epitopes that could be effective vaccine targets of HCV genotype 1 of Asian origin against HLA alleles frequently distributed in Asian countries. A total of 85 complete genome sequences of HCV 1 of Asian origin were retrieved from the HCV sequence database. Using in silico tools, T cell epitopes were predicted from conserved regions of all the available HCV 1 subtypes against Asian HLA alleles. Using 10 MHC I supertypes 51 epitopes was predicted as promiscuous binders. MHC class I supertypes A2 and B7 were found to be good promiscuous binders for a large number of predicted epitopes. Other alleles of MHC I supertypes (B57, B27, BX, B44) either were not respondent as promiscuous binders or responded only to a limited number of epitopes. Against 8 predominantly found Asian alleles of DRB1 supertype, 42 epitopes was predicted as promiscuous binders. MHC class II alleles DRB1-0101, DRB1-0701 and DRB1-1501 were the highest binders to promiscuous predicted epitopes while DRB1-0301 was the least binder for the predicted promiscuous epitopes of HCV 1 genotype of Asian origin. Literature review survey of predicted epitopes via IEDB also confirmed that great numbers of predicted epitopes are true positive. Hence, sophisticated selection of viral proteins and MHCs provided conserved promiscuous epitopes that can be used as effective vaccine candidates for all Asian counties.

Keywords

Hepatitus C Virus, Immunoinformatics, MHC, Epitope, Conservancy, Asia

Abbreviations

HCV: hepatitis C virus, MHC: major histocompatability complex, HLA: human leukocyte antigen, CTL: cytotoxic T lymphocytes

Citation

Shehzadi et al. Bioinformation 8(20): 957-962 (2012)
 

Edited by

P Kangueane

ISSN

0973-2063

Publisher

Biomedical Informatics

License

This is an Open Access article which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. This is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License.