Analysis of immunodominant African swine fever virus peptides for candidate vaccine design

Relevance. Prevention and control of ASF is significantly hampered by the lack of available vaccines and effective therapeutic measures. The ASF virus is capable of interfering with various cellular signaling pathways, leading to immunomodulation, which makes the development of an effective vaccine extremely difficult. Given the various limitations of known strategies for the development of ASF vaccines, the search for promising platforms for the development of safe and effective drugs to combat the virus is ongoing. The basis for the design of candidate vaccines is the choice of immunogenic peptides that provide stable humoral and cellular immune responses and the identification of potential targets for immune responses.
Methods. In this study, 31 candidate amino acid sequences of more than 100 strains and epizootic isolates of the African swine fever virus was analyzed using standard bioinformatic methods.
Results. Based on the number of T- and B-cell epitopes identified during the initial analysis, the type and severity of the immune response in target animals, it was found that the proteins p72 (B646L), p30 (CP204L), p54 (E183L), pp62 (CP530R), pp220 (CP2475L) have the greatest immunogenic potential. For the analyzed proteins, the N- and O-glycosylation sites, the localization of signal peptides and transmembrane domains were determined in silico, and their main physicochemical properties were predicted. The application of the proposed approaches made it possible to select potentially immunogenic epitopes of ASFV proteins, which in the future will be used to design new candidate vector vaccines. Given the number of antigenic determinants, the considered proteins, in our opinion, have a significant vaccine potential, however, real data on their immunogenicity will be established during practical testing of the developed vector constructs.

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