Design of multi epitope-based peptide vaccine against E protein of human COVID-19: An immunoinformatics approach

Miyssa I. Abdelmageed; Abdelrahman H. Abdelmoneim; Mujahed I. Mustafa; Nafisa M. Elfadol; Naseem S. Murshed; Shaza W. Shantier; Abdelrafie M. Makhawi

Peptide-based vaccines do not need in vitro culture making them biologically safe, and their selectivity allows accurate activation of immune responses [25, 26] . The core mechanism of the peptide vaccines is built on the chemical method to synthesize the recognized B-cell and T-cell epitopes that are immunodominant and can induce specific immune responses. B-cell epitope of a target molecule can be linked with a T-cell epitope to make it immunogenic. The T-cell epitopes are short peptide fragments (8-20 amino acids), whereas the B-cell epitopes can be proteins [27, 28] . Therefore, in this study, we aimed to design a peptide-based vaccine to predict epitopes from corona envelope (E) protein using immunoinformatics analysis [29] [30] [31] [32] [33] [34] . While rapid further studies are recommended to prove the efficiency of the predicted epitopes as a peptide vaccine against this emerging infection.