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

Mapping the residues of the B cell epitopes onto the available structure of the SARS-CoV S protein revealed that the linear epitopes (Table 4 ) map to seemingly less-exposed regions, away from the most exposed region, the "spike head" (Figure 3a) . In contrast, all discontinuous B cell epitopes (Table 5) map onto the spike head region (Figure 3b, top panel) , which contains the receptor-binding motif of the SARS-CoV S protein (F. Li, 2005) . We observe that few residues of the discontinuous epitopes that lie . CC-BY-NC 4.0 International license author/funder. It is made available under a The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is the .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 within the receptor-binding motif are identical within SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 (Figure 3b ). It has been reported recently that SARS-CoV-2 is able to bind to the same receptor as SARS-CoV (ACE2) for cell entry, despite having multiple amino acid differences with SARS-CoV's receptor-binding motif (Hoffmann et al., 2020; Letko & Munster, 2020; Lu et al., 2020; Zhou et al., 2020) . Whether the antibodies specific to this motif maintain their binding and elicit an immune response against SARS-CoV-2 warrants further experimental investigation.