The Essential Facts of Wuhan Novel Coronavirus Outbreak in China and Epitope-based Vaccine Designing against COVID-19

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

The allergenicity of the selected epitopes were predicted using two online tools i.e., AllerTOP v2.0 (https://www.ddg-pharmfac.net/AllerTOP/) and AllergenFP v1.0 (http://ddgpharmfac.net/AllergenFP/). AllerTOP server generates more accurate results than AllergenFP server [115] [116] . For this reason, during prediction, the results predicted by AllerTOP were given much priority. The toxicity prediction of the selected epitopes was carried out using ToxinPred server (http://crdd.osdd.net/raghava/toxinpred/) using SVM (support vector method) based method, keeping all the parameters default. The SVM is a machine learning technique which is used in the server for differentiating the toxic and non-toxic peptides [117] . After the antigenicity, allergenicity and toxicity tests, the epitopes that were found to be antigenic, non-allergenic and non-toxic, were considered as the best predicted epitopes and selected for the later phases of the experiment.