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

Abstract

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 un-clear where the well-defined B-cell epitopes for glycoprotein E which induce the neutralizing an-tibodies 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 glyco-protein amino acids, the hydrophilicity, antigenic-ity, accessibility and flexibility of envelop glyco-protein 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 den-gue 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 epi-topes 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. Sub-sequently, further studies will be carried out to examine the antigenicity and protection of the synthetic peptides with higher scores in the av-erage antigen index (AI) and better hydrophilic properties determined by our data.