Preliminary identification of potential vaccine targets for the COVID-19 coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) based on SARS-CoV immunological studies

Syed Faraz Ahmed; Ahmed A. Quadeer; Matthew R. McKay

A recent study has also predicted T cell epitopes for SARS-CoV-2 that may be presented by a population from the Asia-Pacific region (Ramaiah & Arumugaswami, 2020) . Again, there are multiple differences to our work. First, the focus of that study was on MHC Class II epitopes, while here we . CC-BY-NC 4.0 International license author/funder. It is made available under a The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is the . https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.02.03.933226 doi: bioRxiv preprint considered both MHC Class I and II epitopes. Interestingly, while we found a few MHC Class II epitopes using our approach (Table S3) , only one of these (HLA-DRB1*01:01) appeared in our identified epitope set (Table 3) , due to their comparatively low estimated population coverage. Second, computational tools were used to predict MHC Class II epitopes in (Ramaiah & Arumugaswami, 2020) , while here we analysed the SARS-CoV-derived epitopes that have been determined experimentally, using either positive T cell or MHC binding assays, and which match identically with the available SARS-CoV-2 sequences (as of 9 February 2020).