Yassir A. Almofti^1,, Khoubieb Ali Abd-elrahman², Sahar Abd Elgadir Gassmallah³, Mohammed Ahmed Salih⁴

Efforts for developing vaccine against Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) is crucial in prevention of SARS re-emergence. The global outbreak of SARS was contained since 2003. However concerns remain over the possibility of future recurrences, especially with recent reports of laboratory-acquired infections and the presence of sporadic cases, raising a serious concern. SARS-CoV spike S protein (1255aa) is an important target in developing safe and effective vaccines. In this study multiple bio-informatics and immuno-informatics implementation tools from NCBI and IEDB were used for epitopes prediction from spike S protein. The predicted epitopes were further assessed for population coverage against the whole world population. Our results demonstrated that the epitopes _38-RGVYYPDEI_-46, _200-YQPIDVVRD_-208 and _388-VVKGDDVRQ_-396 elicit and stimulate B cell since they got higher score in Emini and Kolaskar and tongaonker software. For T-cell: the epitopes _47-FRSDTLYLT_{-55, 195-}YVYKGYQPI_-203 and _880-FAMQMAYRF_-888 were found to interact with both MHC-1 and MHC-II alleles. Moreover _851-MIAAYTAAL_-859 showed higher affinity to MHC-1 alleles while _782-FNFSQILPD_-790 interacted only with MHC-II alleles. The population coverage epitope set for MHC-1 and MHC-II predicted epitopes was 82.16% and 99.97% respectively. All predicted epitopes against T cell (MHC-I/MHC-II) demonstrated strong potentiality as promising peptides vaccine with population coverage epitope set against the whole world of 100%. Taken together eight epitopes were proposed to interact with B and T cells and act as peptide vaccine against SARS-CoV virus. In vitro and in vivo studies are recommended to prove the effectiveness of these epitopes as a peptide vaccine.

SARS, NCBI, IEDB, Insilico prediction, Immunoinformatics