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In Silico Design of Epitope-Based Allergy Vaccine Against Bellatella germanica Cockroach Allergens

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Abstract

Asthma is a chronic inflammatory airway disorder that is a subclass of IgE mediated hypersensitivity. Cockroach allergy is one of the main reasons of asthma. German cockroach (Blattella germanica) and American cockroach (Periplaneta Americana) are two principal species of cockroach. Bla g 2, Bla g 4, Bla g 5 and alpha-amylase 53 kDa are the known allergens of Blattella germanica that are used in this study to design the peptide allergy vaccine. In this study, with the help of immunoinformatics approaches, we try to design an efficient epitope vaccine against above-mentioned allergens. The designed vaccine consists of the common epitopes of T and B cells epitopes from the aforesaid allergens that are fused to each other by these two linkers; GGS and linker; moreover, to boost vaccine immunogenicity, the D1 of flagellin was added to N-terminal of vaccine. Afterwards, a 3D model of the final vaccine construct was generated using GalaxyWEB, and validated by ProSA-web, ERRAT and the Ramachandran plot softwares, in order to select the best 3D model. Finally, protein docking was performed between the flagellin part of vaccine and toll-like receptor 5 (TLR5). In sum, our obtained results from computational studies shows that the designed epitope vaccine can be suggested as a prophylactic or therapeutic candidate vaccine Blattella germanica cockroach’s allergens; however, the efficacy of vaccine should be confirmed by immunological assays.

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Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Shiraz University of Medical Sciences (16878) for supporting the conduct of this research.

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Correspondence to Navid Nezafat.

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Ahmadi, F., Dorosti, H., Ghasemi, Y. et al. In Silico Design of Epitope-Based Allergy Vaccine Against Bellatella germanica Cockroach Allergens. Int J Pept Res Ther 26, 1739–1749 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10989-019-09980-7

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