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

The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is the . https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.03.022723 doi: bioRxiv preprint become a major challenge confronting the whole world. Development of vaccine is one of the effective means of prevention and treatment of the virus long-term. Epitope vaccine is the trend of development of vaccine due to the advantages of strong pertinence, less toxic and side effects and easy to transportation and storage [6] . The determination of epitopes is the basis of the development and application of vaccine, and the clinical diagnosis and treatment. Currently, the methods which were mainly used are X-crystal diffraction method, immune experiment method and bioinformatics method. The first two are time-consuming and laborious, the bioinformatics method is gaining more and more credibility among researchers [3, 6, 7] . There are many factors to be considered in the prediction of epitopes by bioinformatics method, such as the surface probablity and flexibility of the epitopes. At the same time, it is necessary to exclude the structurally stable and non-deformable α-helix, β-sheet, glycosylation sites which may obscure the epitopes or alter the antigenicity, etc [8] . Even so, the predicted epitopes are still inaccurate [4] . Compared with the current study on SARS-CoV-2, this work adopted various prediction methods and 3D structure databases developed in recent years, which were based on artificial neural network, Hidden Markov Model(HMM), Support Vector Machine(SVM), etc, such as ABCpred, BepiPred2.0, SEPPA 3.0, IEDB, etc. Compared with prediction by a single method [9] or on the basis of epitopes of SARS [10] , these methods and databases greatly improved the accuracy of prediction and had more bioinformatic meaning. We comprehensively analyzed the prediction results from the tools which were widely used, set up screening criteria on the basis of primary structure, secondary structure and tertiary structure, so that the prediction results would more accurate and reliable.