Vaccinomics Approach for Designing Potential Peptide Vaccine by Targeting Shigella spp. Serine Protease Autotransporter Subfamily Protein SigA

Shigellosis, a bacillary dysentery, is closely associated with diarrhoea in human and causes infection of 165 million people worldwide per year. Casein-degrading serine protease autotransporter of enterobacteriaceae (SPATE) subfamily protein SigA, an outer membrane protein, exerts both cytopathic and enterotoxic effects especially cytopathic to human epithelial cell type-2 (HEp-2) and is shown to be highly immunogenic. In the present study, we have tried to impose the vaccinomics approach for designing a common peptide vaccine candidate against the immunogenic SigA of Shigella spp. At first, 44 SigA proteins from different variants of S. flexneri, S. dysenteriae, S. boydii, and S. sonnei were assessed to find the most antigenic protein. We retrieved 12 peptides based on the highest score for human leukocyte antigen (HLA) supertypes analysed by NetCTL. Initially, these peptides were assessed for the affinity with MHC class I and class II alleles, and four potential core epitopes VTARAGLGY, FHTVTVNTL, HTTWTLTGY, and IELAGTLTL were selected. From these, FHTVTVNTL and IELAGTLTL peptides were shown to have 100% conservancy. Finally, IELAGTLTL was shown to have the highest population coverage (83.86%) among the whole world population. In vivo study of the proposed epitope might contribute to the development of functional and unique widespread vaccine, which might be an operative alleyway to thwart dysentery from the world.