UNASSIGNED: Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) with pandemic potential is a major worldwide threat to public health. However, vaccine development for this pathogen lags behind as immunity associated with protection is currently largely unknown. In this study, an immunoinformatics-driven genome-wide screening strategy of vaccine targets was performed to thoroughly screen the vital and effective dominant immunogens against MERS-CoV. Conservancy and population coverage analysis of the epitopes were done by the Immune Epitope Database. The results showed that the nucleocapsid (N) protein of MERS-CoV might be a better protective immunogen with high conservancy and potential eliciting both neutralizing antibodies and T-cell responses compared with spike (S) protein. Further, the B-cell, helper T-cell and @entity137 ( @entity137 ) epitopes were screened and mapped to the N protein. A total of 15 linear and 10 conformal B-cell epitopes that may induce protective neutralizing antibodies were obtained. Additionally, a total of 71 peptides with 9-mer core sequence were identified as helper T-cell epitopes, and 34 peptides were identified as @entity137 . Based on the maximum HLA binding alleles, top 10 helper T-cell epitopes and @entity137 that may elicit protective cellular immune responses against MERS-CoV were selected as MERS vaccine candidates. Population coverage analysis showed that the putative helper T-cell epitopes and @entity137 could cover the vast majority of the population in 15 geographic regions considered where vaccine would be employed. The B- and T-cell stimulation potentials of the screened epitopes is to be further validated for their efficient use as vaccines against MERS-CoV. Collectively, this study provides novel vaccine target candidates and may prompt further development of vaccines against MERS-CoV and other @entity7823 .

Epitope-Based Vaccine Target Screening against Highly Pathogenic MERS-CoV: An In Silico Approach Applied to XXXX .

@entity137 :: ('MESH:D064420', 'Disease') :: ['CTL epitopes', 'cytotoxic T lymphocyte', 'CTL'] @entity7823 :: ('MESH:D021821', 'Disease') :: ['emerging infectious diseases']
@entity7823 :: (MESH:D021821,Disease) :: ['Emerging Infectious Diseases']
