Introduction: Lumpy skin disease, an economically significant bovine illness, is now found in previously unheard-of geographic regions. Vaccination is one of the most important ways to stop its further spread.
Aim: Therefore, in this study, we applied advanced immunoinformatics approaches to design and develop an effective lumpy skin disease virus (LSDV) vaccine.
Methods: The membrane glycoprotein was selected for prediction of the different B- and T-cell epitopes by using the immune epitope database. The selected B- and T-cell epitopes were combined with the appropriate linkers and adjuvant resulted in a vaccine chimera construct. Bioinformatics tools were used to predict, refine and validate the 2D, 3D structures and for molecular docking with toll-like receptor 4 using different servers. The constructed vaccine candidate was further processed on the basis of antigenicity, allergenicity, solubility, different physiochemical properties and molecular docking scores.
Results: The in silico immune simulation induced significant response for immune cells. In silico cloning and codon optimization were performed to express the vaccine candidate in Escherichia coli. This study highlights a good signal for the design of a peptide-based LSDV vaccine.
Conclusion: Thus, the present findings may indicate that the engineered multi-epitope vaccine is structurally stable and can induce a strong immune response, which should help in developing an effective vaccine towards controlling LSDV infection.
Keywords: PET29a (+) vector; dynamic simulations; lumpy skin disease virus; membrane glycoprotein B and T cells; molecular docking; vaccine.
© 2024 The Authors. Veterinary Medicine and Science published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.