Purpose: The aim of this research was to predict the epitope for coronavirus family spike protein. Coronavirus family is highly evolved viruses which cause several outbreaks in the past decades. Therefore, it is crucial to design a global vaccine candidate to prevent the coronavirus outbreak in the future.
Materials and methods: The spike protein amino acid sequences from nine coronavirus family were searched in the Uniprot database. The spike protein sequences were aligned using Clustal method. The highly conservatives amino acids were analyzed its B cell linear and continuous epitopes and T cell epitopes.
Results: From the alignment results it was found that there is a highly conserved region in the extracellular domain of spike protein. With prediction methods from this highly conserved region, B cell and T cell epitopes from spike protein were derived.
Conclusion: From several different prediction results, B cell epitope and T cell epitope were identified in the highly conserved region thus it is promising to be developed as a coronavirus vaccine candidate.
Keywords: Coronavirus; Epitopes; Respiratory tract infections; Tools.
© Korean Vaccine Society.