Immunoinformatics-guided designing of epitope-based subunit vaccine against the SARS Coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2)

Sarkar, Bishajit; Ullah, Md. Asad; Johora, Fatema Tuz; Taniya, Masuma Afrin; Araf, Yusha

SARS Coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic has become a global issue which has raised the concern of scientific community to design and discover a counter-measure against this deadly virus which has caused deaths of numerous infected people upon infection and spreading. To date, no effective vaccine is available which can combat the infection caused by this virus. This study was conducted to design possible epitope-based subunit vaccines against the SARS-CoV-2 virus using the approaches of reverse vaccinology and immunoinformatics. Upon continual computational experimentation three possible vaccine constructs were designed and one vaccine construct was selected as the best vaccine based on molecular docking study which is supposed to effectively act against SARS-CoV-2. Thereafter, molecular dynamics simulation and in silico codon adaptation experiments were carried out in order to check biological stability and find effective mass production strategy of the selected vaccine. This study should contribute to uphold the present efforts of the researches to secure a definitive treatment for this lethal disease.