ORIGINAL ARTICLE   

Minerva Biotecnologica 2020 June;32(2):52-7

DOI: 10.23736/S1120-4826.20.02610-5

Copyright © 2020 EDIZIONI MINERVA MEDICA

language: English

Designing a recombinant multiepitope vaccine against Leishmania donovani based immunoinformatics approaches

Pejman HASHEMZADEH ^{1, 2}, Arian KARIMI ROUZBAHANI ³, Mojgan BANDEHPOUR ⁴, Farnaz KHEIRANDISH ^{1, 2, 5} ✉, Hassan DARIUSHNEJAD ^{1, 2}, Mohsen MOHAMADI ¹

¹ Department of Medical Biotechnology, School of Medicine, Lorestan University of Medical Sciences, Khorramabad, Iran; ² Razi Herbal Medicines Research Center, Lorestan University of Medical Sciences, Khorramabad, Iran; ³ Student Research Committee, Lorestan University of Medical Sciences, Khorramabad, Iran; ⁴ Cellular and Molecular Biology Research Center, Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran; ⁵ Department of Medical Parasitology and Mycology, School of Medicine, Lorestan University of Medical Sciences, Khorramabad, Iran

BACKGROUND: Visceral leishmaniasis is a common and major parasitic disease in the world that is caused by Leishmania intracellular protozoan species and there is already no definitive cure for this disease. Since the treatment of leishmaniasis has side effects and drug resistance, in addition to being costly, thus, it seems that an effective vaccination is a more appropriate choice to prevent this disease. The aim of this research was to study on some Leishmania donovani (L. donovani) proteins, including Amastin, sterol 24-c-methyltransferase (SMT), and histone H1, as the vaccine candidate against visceral leishmaniasis.
METHODS: Using bioinformatics servers such as: NCBI, ABCpred, IEDB, PSIPRED, SCRATCH, I-TASSER, ProtParam, Protein-sol, VaxiJen, AlgPred, SMS and jcat, the properties of three proteins, Amastin, SMT, and Leishmania donovani histone H1, were analyzed as the candidate for a multi-epitope vaccine.
RESULTS: The results showed that based on immunoinformatics analysis for each antigen, three epitopes had high immunogenicity, which could be beneficial in designing multi-epitope vaccine against Leishmania donovani.
CONCLUSIONS: The Structure designed had acceptable quality with software reviews. Evaluating the efficacy of these epitopes can be assessed by in-vitro and in-vivo immunological studies.

KEY WORDS: Vaccines; Leishmania donovani; Leishmaniasis, visceral