Prediction and Evolution of B Cell Epitopes of Surface Protein in SARS-CoV-2

Jerome R Lon; Yunmeng Bai; Bingxu Zhong; Fuqiang Cai; Hongli Du

All the epitopes of the S, E, M protein were absolute conservative among all SARS-CoV-2 sequences(Table 3A, Figure S3A -G). To further calculate the conservation of the epitopes in different coronavirus datasets, the representative sequences from SARS-CoV-2 were selected to participate in the human coronavirus dataset and the coronavirus dataset, due to amino acid sequences of some S or E or M protein were absolute conservative in SARS-CoV-2. The conservation was a little lower in human coronavirus than those of in SARS-CoV-2(Table 3B, Figure S4A -G), and the epitope D was easy to mutate. The other epitopes were conservative and the epitope F/G was the most conservative one. As for the coronavirus(Table 3C, Figure S5A -G), in the 5 epitopes of S protein, 4 of which obtained the conservative score less than 1, ranging from -0.854 to 0.256. It showed that the epitope C with the minimum score is the most stable and not easy to mutate. Besides, the score of the epitope D was 1.247, showing the relatively high possibility to mutate. The epitopes of the E protein were stable with the conservative score less than 1. The site conservation of the M protein could not be predicted due to the failure of credible homology modeling.