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

For the expanded set of epitopes, all of which have at least one positive MHC binding assay, we found that 264 epitope-sequences have an identical match in SARS-CoV-2 proteins and have associated MHC allele information available (listed in Table S2 ). Of these 264 epitopes, ~80% were MHC Class I restricted epitopes (Table S3) The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is the .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 alleles and was estimated to provide an accumulated population coverage of 96.29% (Table 3) . We also computed the population coverage of this specific set of epitopes in China, the country most affected by the COVID-19 outbreak, which was estimated to be slightly lower (88.11%) as certain MHC alleles (e.g., HLA-A*02:01) associated with some of these epitopes are less frequent in the Chinese population (Table 3) . Repeating the same greedy approach but focusing on the Chinese population, instead of a global population, the maximum population coverage was estimated to be 92.76% (Table S4 ).