To control and prevent the current COVID-19 pandemic, the development of novel vaccines is an emergent issue. In addition, we need to develop tools that can measure/monitor T-cell and B-cell responses to know how our immune system is responding to this deleterious virus. However, little information is currently available about the immune target epitopes of novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) to induce host immune responses. Through a comprehensive bioinformatic screening of potential epitopes derived from the SARS-CoV-2 sequences for HLAs commonly present in the Japanese population, we identified 2013 and 1399 possible peptide epitopes that are likely to have the high affinity (<0.5%- and 2%-rank, respectively) to HLA class I and II molecules, respectively, that may induce CD8 + and CD4 + T-cell responses. These epitopes distributed across the structural (spike, envelope, membrane, and nucleocapsid proteins) and the nonstructural proteins (proteins corresponding to six open reading frames); however, we found several regions where high-affinity epitopes were significantly enriched. By comparing the sequences of these predicted T cell epitopes to the other coronaviruses, we identified 781 HLA-class I and 418 HLA-class II epitopes that have high homologies to SARS-CoV. To further select commonly-available epitopes that would be applicable to larger populations, we calculated population coverages based on the allele frequencies of HLA molecules, and found 2 HLA-class I epitopes covering 83.8% of the Japanese population. The findings in the current study provide us valuable information to design widely-available vaccine epitopes against SARS-CoV-2 and also provide the useful information for monitoring T-cell responses.
【저자키워드】 High-throughput screening, Immunogenetics, 【초록키워드】 SARS-CoV-2, Vaccine, SARS-CoV, COVID-19 pandemic, allele frequency, immune system, virus, CD4, CD8, immune, Novel coronavirus, Region, Coverage, membrane, nonstructural protein, HLA, Japanese, T-cell, information, epitope, T cell epitope, T-cell responses, Deleterious, HLA class I, other coronaviruses, sequence, high affinity, Nucleocapsid proteins, host immune responses, homology, HLA molecules, B-cell response, populations, Prevent, predicted, develop, significantly, addition, calculated, induce, peptide epitope, the SARS-CoV-2, 【제목키워드】 T cell epitope, Bioinformatic,