Prediction and in vitro verification of potential CTL epitopes conserved among PRRSV-2 strains

Simon Welner, Morten Nielsen, Michael Rasmussen, Søren Buus, Gregers Jungersen, Lars Erik Larsen

    Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articleResearchpeer-review

    336 Downloads (Pure)

    Abstract

    Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome Virus (PRRSV) is the causative agent of one of the most important porcine diseases with a high impact on animal health, welfare, and production economy. PRRSV exhibits a multitude of immunoevasive strategies that, in combination with a very high mutation rate, has hampered the development of safe and broadly protective vaccines. Aiming at a vaccine inducing an effective cytotoxic T cell response, a bioinformatics approach was taken to identify conserved PRRSV-derived peptides predicted to react broadly with common swine leukocyte antigen (SLA) class I alleles. Briefly, all possible 9- and 10-mer peptides were generated from 104 complete PRRSV type 2 genomes of confirmed high quality, and peptides with high binding affinity to five common SLAs were identified combining the NetMHCpan and positional scanning combinatorial peptide libraries binding predictions. Predicted binders were prioritized according to genomic conservation and SLA coverage using the PopCover algorithm. From this, 53 peptides were acquired for further analysis. Binding affinity and stability of a subset of 101 peptide-SLA combinations were validated in vitro for 4 of the 5 SLAs. Eventually, 23% of the predicted peptide-SLA combinations showed to form complexes with a dissociation half-life ≥30 min. Additionally, combining the two prediction methods proved to be more robust across alleles than either method used alone in terms of predicted-to-observed correlations. In summary, our approach represents a finely tuned epitope prediction pipeline providing a rationally selected ensemble of peptides for future in vivo experiments with pigs expressing the included SLAs.
    Original languageEnglish
    JournalImmunogenetics
    Volume69
    Issue number10
    Pages (from-to)689-702
    ISSN0093-7711
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 2017

    Bibliographical note

    This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

    Keywords

    • Cytotoxic T lymphocytes
    • NetMHCpan
    • PopCover
    • Positional scanning combinatorial peptide library (PSCPL)
    • Swine leukocyte antigen
    • Vaccine

    Fingerprint

    Dive into the research topics of 'Prediction and in vitro verification of potential CTL epitopes conserved among PRRSV-2 strains'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

    Cite this