Immunoinformatics Predication and Modelling of a Cocktail of B- and T-cells Epitopes from Envelope Glycoprotein and Nucleocapsid Proteins of Sin Nombre Virus

Sin Nombre virus is a category A pathogen with a reported mortality rate ranging from 30% to 50%. It was responsible for the 2012 Yosemite National Park outbreak. Until now, Specific therapy is not available for the treatment of HCPS caused by SNV. Despite many efforts to develop safe and effective vaccines against SNV, included conventional approaches as well as molecular vaccine approaches, to date there are no vaccines proven to be highly efficacious against SNV. In our study, we analyzed envelope glycoprotein and nucleocapsid of SNV by using immunoinformatics tools housed in IEDB resources; in order to determine the most conserved and immunogenic epitopes for B- and T-cells. Then the predicted epitopes were assessed for the population coverage against the whole world population with the MHC-I and MHC-II restricted alleles. Among predicted epitopes for B-cell, the best candidates for glycoprotein and nucleocapsid were the epitope 743CKKYAYPWQT752 and the epitope 271QVDESKVS278, respectively. For glycoprotein CD8+ T cell predicted epitopes, the epitopes 208MTLPVTCFL216 and 458YTFTSLFSL466 were selected. Interestingly, the best candidates epitopes for nucleocapsid were the epitopes 25YILSFALPI133 and 239FLAARCPFL247 which had high affinity to interact with both MHC classes, I and II, and they had an excellent population coverage for Class I and II alleles throughout the world. To the best of our knowledge, our study for the first time has predicted a cocktail of B- and T-cell epitopes for designing an effective vaccine against HCPS caused by SNV