Contriving a multi-epitope vaccine against African swine fever utilizing immunoinformatics

Introduction: African swine fever virus (ASFV) causes African swine fever, a highly fatal hemorrhagic viral disease of domestic swine, severely impacting the development of swine industries in affected countries. The management of this disease is significantly hindered by the absence of protective vaccines against the virus. A cost-effective approach to developing potent vaccines is by employing immunoinformatic tools to identify highly conserved IFN-g , CD4+, CD8+, and B-cell epitopes. These can then be combined to create a multi-epitope broad-spectrum vaccine. Methods: Therefore, in this study, immunoinformatic tools were utilized to identify CD8+ T-cell, CD4+ T-cell, B-cell, and IFN-g epitopes of the ASFV major coat protein p72, CD2 homologue (CD2v), and C-type lectin-like proteins, which are promising vaccine candidates capable of eliciting a protective immune response against the virus. The epitopes were computationally assembled to generate a multi-epitope subunit vaccine against ASFV. Molecular docking was employed to assess the interaction between the vaccine construct and immune receptors Toll-like receptor 9 (TLR-9) and Swine Leukocyte Antigen-1 (SLA-1). Results: Molecular dynamic simulation revealed stable interactions between the vaccine construct and the immune receptors. In silico cloning and codon optimization were utilized to enhance the efficient expression of the vaccine in an E. coli expression system. The potential of the vaccine to provoke effective immune responses was evaluated using in silico immune simulation. Conclusion: These computational approaches have shown that the vaccine is structurally stable and capable of inducing both humoral and cell-mediated immune responses against ASFV. However, this study needs to be validated further experimentally.