RESEARCH ARTICLE
In Silico Design of a Chimeric Protein Containing Antigenic Fragments of Helicobacter pylori; A Bioinformatic Approach
Nazanin Mohammad1, #, Mehrnaz Taghipour Karsabet1, #, Jafar Amani2, Abolfazl Ardjmand3, Mohsen Razavi Zadeh4, Mohammad Khalifeh Gholi5, Mahmood Saffari1, Amir Ghasemi1, *
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2016Volume: 10
First Page: 97
Last Page: 112
Publisher ID: TOMICROJ-10-97
DOI: 10.2174/1874285801610010097
Article History:
Received Date: 29/7/2015Revision Received Date: 21/1/2016
Acceptance Date: 25/1/2016
Electronic publication date: 20/05/2016
Collection year: 2016

open-access license: This is an open access article licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 4.0 International Public License (CC BY-NC 4.0) (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/legalcode), which permits unrestricted, non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the work is properly cited.
Abstract
Helicobacter pylori is a global health problem which has encouraged scientists to find new ways to diagnose, immunize and eradicate the H. pylori infection. In silico studies are a promising approach to design new chimeric antigen having the immunogenic potential of several antigens. In order to obtain such benefit in H. pylori vaccine study, a chimeric gene containing four fragments of FliD sequence (1-600 bp), UreB (327-334 bp),VacA (744-805 bp) and CagL(51-100 bp) which have a high density of B- and T-cell epitopes was designed. The secondary and tertiary structures of the chimeric protein and other properties such as stability, solubility and antigenicity were analyzed. The in silico results showed that after optimizing for the purpose of expression in Escherichia coli BL21, the solubility and antigenicity of the construct fragments were highly retained. Most regions of the chimeric protein were found to have a high antigenic propensity and surface accessibility. These results would be useful in animal model application and accounted for the development of an epitope-based vaccine against the H. pylori.