Multi Epitope Based Vaccine Design against Capnocytophaga canimorsus through Immunoinformatics Approaches

Immunoinformatics has provided an important contribution to the acceleration of vaccine research. The in silico tools developed under immunoinformatics efficiently filter candidate vaccines and select the most appropriate ones for in vitro and in vivo studies. Multi epitope-based vaccine design against Capnocytophaga canimorsus infections through immunoinformatics approaches was proposed in the present investigation. Outer membrane protein (OMP) of C. canimorsus was used to develop peptide-based vaccines. IEDB tools are used in this research. The antigenic potential of C. canimorsus OMP was evaluated via VaxiJen v2.0 and the Overall Prediction for the Protective Antigen was found to be 0.6049. MHC-I and -II binding epitopes with maximum scores were found to be “QEIGKLKKY” for HLAB*44:03 and “FNAVQEIGK” for HLA-DRB5*01:01, respectively. ABCPrep analysis identified multiple epitopes. The maximum score of 0.91 was associated with the sequence “KNMRIGYVDMDFILEN”. Discontinuous epitopes were also detected in this research with the maximum score observed for the regions A:L247, A:E248, A:Q250 and A:K251. The population coverage for the global population was calculated to be 96.45% for a defined set of epitopes. In conclusion, since the adoption of dogs and cats as pets has increased after COVID-19, there is a clear risk for C. canimorsus infections. The proposed peptide-based vaccines in this report may mitigate this risk on a global level.