Dengue virus, a mosquito-borne flavivirus, causes dengue fever in humans. There are four dengue serotypes and infection with more than one serotype resulting in severe dengue hemorrhagic fever/dengue shock syndrome. So far, only one vaccine is available for dengue, but its efficacy against all serotypes across various ethnics is not confirmed. A vaccine that can neutralize all four dengue serotypes could be more effective in combating the virus. Prediction of B-cell epitopes using in silico tools, and their subsequent identification will enhance our understanding of the disease pathogenesis and in the development of better vaccines. In this work, three different prediction methods, viz., ABCpred, BCpred, and AAP, were employed for the analysis of all four DV proteomes, resulting in the prediction of 10083 B-cell epitopes, out of which 251 were found to be consensus epitopes occurring in more than one DV serotype. The 251 consensus epitopes were further analyzed for toxicity, antigenicity, and overlapping epitope prediction. Among them, 151 epitopes were predicted as antigenic. Six of them were found to be overlapping, i.e., predicted by more than two prediction methods. Analysis using IEDB database indicates that 92 out of 151 predicetd peptides are novel, hitherto unreported peptides.
Key words: Dengue virus; B cell epitope; Antigenicity; IEDB; Vaccine
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