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Bioinformatics analysis and characteristics of envelop glycoprotein E epitopes of dengue virus

2009; Scientific Research Publishing; Volume: 02; Issue: 02 Linguagem: Inglês

10.4236/jbise.2009.22022

1937-688X

Judy Zhong, Wei Zhao, Peng Liang, Shanfeng Li, Hong Cao,

Viral Infections and Vectors

The major envelope glycoprotein E of dengue (DEN) virus plays a central role in the biology of flaviviruses.It is capable of inducing a protective immune response in vivo and responsible for the viral binding to the cellular receptor.The crystal structures of glycoprotein E ectodomains have already been determined.However, it is still unclear where the well-defined B-cell epitopes for glycoprotein E which induce the neutralizing antibodies locates.Thus, in order to characterize the role of glycoprotein E in the pathogenesis of dengue virus infection, we first used network servers (http://bio.dfci.harvard.edu/Tools/& http://www.imtech.res.in) to predict and analyze the well defined B-cell and T-cell epitopes of the glycoprotein of the DEN-1 HAWAII strain.Then based on the highly conserved envelop glycoprotein amino acids, the hydrophilicity, antigenicity, accessibility and flexibility of envelop glycoprotein E were further predicted by using Biotic softwares (DNASTAR) and network servers (http://bio.dfci.harvard.edu/Tools/),the secondary structure was putatively obtained.In our study, the sequence at 281-295 amino acid (aa) for dengue virus type 1 HAWAII strain and the sequence at 345-359, 383-397 for dengue virus type 2 NGC strain were predicted as the more prevalent epitopes by using multiple parameters and different analysis softwares, respectively.Two epitopes of DEN-2 and one of DEN-1 locate on the domain Ш and domainⅡ of the protein E, respectively.Subsequently, further studies will be carried out to examine the antigenicity and protection of the synthetic peptides with higher scores in the average antigen index (AI) and better hydrophilic properties determined by our data.