Designing a highly immunogenic multi epitope based subunit vaccine against Bacillus cereus

Asif Rasheed, Muhammad; Awais, Muhammad; Aldhahrani, Adil; Althobaiti, Fayez; Alhazmi, Alaa; Sattar, Sobia; Afzal, Umara; Ali Baeshen, Hosam; Ali El Enshasy, Hesham; Joe Dailin, Daniel; AL-surhanee, Ameena A.; Kabir, Faryal

OBJECTIVE: Serious non-gastrointestinal-tract infections and food poisoning are caused by Bacillus cereus. Vaccination against B. cereus is very important. The aim of this study was to identify and analyze B and T cell epitopes for chromate transporter protein of the bacteria. METHODS: Multiple sequence alignment with the Clustal Omega method was used to identify conserved regions and Geneious Prime was used to produce a consensus sequence. T and B cell epitopes were predicted by various computational tools from the NetCTL and Immune Epitope Database (IEDB), respectively. RESULTS: Altogether, 6 HTL cells and 11 CTL epitopes were predicted. This vaccine's molecular docking is done with Patch Dock and LigPlot to verify interactions. The immune server (C-IMMSIM) was used to develop In silico immune response in order to assess the multi-epitope vaccine's immunogenic profile. CONCLUSION: We designed universal vaccine against B. cereus responsible for food poisoning. The disease may be avoided with the aid of the proposed epitope-based vaccine.