Background:
Escherichia coli is one of the serious pathogens causing various infections in the animal field, such as neonatal calf diarrhea (NCD), which is responsible for mortality associated with diarrhea during the first days of life.
Aim:
Current work is aimed to designing an effective and safe multi-epitope vaccine candidate against E. coli infection in calves based on the fimbrial protein K99 of Enterotoxigenic E. coli (ETEC) and Immuno-informatics.
Methods:
A conserved sequence of K99 protein was generated, and then highly antigenic, non-allergic, and overlapped epitopes were used to construct a multi-epitope vaccine. Five THL, six MHC II, and four beta cell epitopes were targeted to create the candidate. The candidate vaccine was produced utilizing 15 epitopes and three types of linkers, two types of untranslated region (UTR) human hemoglobin subunit beta (HBB), UTR beta-globin (Rabb), and RpfE protein as an immunomodulation adjuvant.
Results:
Immuno-informatics analysis of the constructed protein showed that the protein was antigenic (antigenic score of 0.8841), stable, non-allergen, and soluble. Furthermore, the Immuno-informatics and Physiochemical analysis of the constructed protein showed a stable, non-allergic, soluble, hydrophilic, and acidic PI (isoelectric point). of 9.34. Docking of the candidate vaccine with the toll-like receptor TLR3 was performed, and results showed a strong interaction between the immune receptor and the vaccine. Finally, the expression efficiency of the construct in Escherichia coli was estimated via computational cloning of the vaccine sequence into Pet28a.
Conclusion:
Results of Immunoinformatics and in silico approaches reveals that designed vaccine is antigenic, stable, and able to bind to the immune cell receptors. Our results interpret the proposed multi-epitope mRNA vaccine as a good preventive option against E coli infection in calves.
Key words: Neonatal calf diarrhea, Fimbrial protein K99, Enterotoxigenic E. coli, Multi-epitope vaccine, mRNA vaccine
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