Advanced In Silico Tools for Designing of Antigenic Epitope as Potential Vaccine Candidates Against Coronavirus

Dangi, Mehak; Kumari, Rinku; Singh, Bharat; Chhillar, Anil Kumar

Vaccines are the most economical and potent substitute of available medicines to cure various bacterial and viral diseases. Earlier, killed or attenuated pathogens were employed for vaccine development. But in present era, the peptide vaccines are in much trend and are favoured over whole vaccines because of their superiority over conventional vaccines. These vaccines are either based on single proteins or on synthetic peptides including several B-cell and T-cell epitopes. However, the overall mechanism of action remains the same and works by prompting the immune system to activate the specific B-cell- and T-cell-mediated responses against the pathogen. Rino Rappuoli and others have contributed in this field by plotting the design of the most potent and fully computational approach for discovery of potential vaccine candidates which is popular as reverse vaccinology. This is quite an unambiguous advance for vaccine evolution where one begins with the genome information of the pathogen and ends up with the list of certain epitopes after application of multiple bioinformatics tools. This book chapter is an effort to bring this approach of reverse vaccinology into notice of readers using example of coronavirus.