Candidate targets for immune responses to 2019-Novel Coronavirus (nCoV): sequence homology- and bioinformatic-based predictions

Alba Grifoni; John Sidney; Yun Zhang; Richard H Scheuermann; Bjoern Peters; Alessandro Sette

When we compared the SARS-CoV T cell epitopes that mapped to 2019-nCOV ( Table 3 ) with the predicted CD4 and CD8 T cell epitopes (Table S3 and Table S6 , respectively), we found that 12 of 17 2019-nCOV T cell epitopes with high sequence identity (≥90%) to the SARS-CoV were independently identified by the two methods. Another 7 of 16 epitopes with moderate sequence identity (70-89%), and 6 of 12 epitopes with low sequence identity (<70%) were also identified by both methods. The lack of absolute correspondence is not surprising, given that the experimental data is derived from a skewed set of HLA restrictions (largely HLA A*02:01), and that our HLA class I prediction strategy targeted a more limited set of alleles that were selected to represent the most frequent worldwide variants; at the same time, the class II predictions are expected to cover 50% of the class II responses (18) .