Design of Tandem Epitope Vaccine Against White Spot Syndrome Virus

Abstract

White spot syndrome virus (WSSV) has long been a major threat on shrimp industry, but there is always a lack of effective prevention and control methods. Vaccines are widely regarded as the safest and most effective methods for preventing WSSV, and some main envelope proteins have showed this potential. In order to combine the antigenicity of these proteins together for better vaccine performance, in this study a strategy commonly used in vertebrates was tried in shrimp. The dominant epitopes of five envelope proteins VP19, VP24, VP26, VP28 and VP41A were predicted and combined for tandem epitope vaccine design by bioinformatics methods, the designed vaccine gene was chemically synthesized and expressed in Escherichia coli, then the recombinant peptide was purified for function evaluation in shrimp. The results showed that the designed peptide had good flexibility, hydrophily and antigenicity with all the epitope regions accessible; the synthesized gene was linked with the tag sequence and successfully expressed in BL21(DE3), and the purified fusion peptide showed a positive effect in WSSV prevention. This research provided a promising method to design vaccines against WSSV, and further work in genetic engineering should be done so as to make it operable for application in shrimp farm.