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

In our present work, different peptides were proposed for the designing of vaccine against COVID-19 (Fig. 1) . In the beginning, the whole genome of COVID-19 was analyzed by comparative genomic approach to determine the potential antigenic target [70] . Artemis Comparative Tool (ACT) was used to analyze human Coronavirus (HCov-HKU1) reference sequence vs. Wuhan-Hu-1 COVID-19. Results obtained (Fig.2) revealed extensive mutation among the tested genomes. New genes; ORF8 and ORF6; were found inserted in COVID-19 which were absent in HCov-HKU1 that might be acquired by the horizontal gene transmission [71] . High rate of mutation between the two genomes were observed in the region from 20000 bp to the end of the sequence. This region encodes the four major structural proteins in coronavirus which are envelope (E) protein, nucleocapsid (N) protein, membrane (M) protein, and spike (S) protein, all of which are required to produce a structurally complete virus [72, 73] .