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

We first assessed the distribution of SARS-derived epitopes as a function of protein of origin (Table 1C ). In the context of B cell responses, most of the 12 antigens in the SARS-CoV proteome are associated with epitopes, with the greatest number derived from spike glycoprotein, . CC-BY-NC-ND 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 It is made available under a The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is the .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/10.1101/2020.02.12.946087 doi: bioRxiv preprint nucleoprotein and membrane protein ( Table 1C) . The paucity of B cell epitopes associated with the other proteins is likely because, on average, B cell epitope screening studies to date have probed regions constituting less than 20% of each respective sequence, including <1% of the Orf 1ab polyprotein. By comparison, the complete span of the spike glycoprotein, nucleoprotein and membrane protein sequences have been probed at least to some extent in B cell assays. A similar situation was observed in the case of T cell epitopes. Here we only considered epitopes whose recognition is restricted by human (HLA) MHC, since MHC polymorphism typically results in different epitopes being recognized in humans and mice.