Plasmodium vivax specific peptides prediction and screening based on repeti-tive protein sequences and linear B cell epitope / 中国血吸虫病防治杂志

ABSTRACT

Objective To establish a method based on repetitive protein sequences and linear B cell epitope to predict and screen specific peptides of Plasmodium vivax. Methods A P. vivax protein sequence database was reconstructed based on Plas-moDB data,and a customized software for searching of repetitive sequences was used to count the repetition times of each 16 aa peptide in the whole database,and the highly repetitive peptides were chosen to predict the potential linear B cell epitopes. The re-petitive peptides with P. vivax specificity were selected as candidate antigen peptides to synthesize and to couple with KLH carrier protein for immunizing BALB/c mice. After the immunization,the antibody titers of the immunized mice were detected. Results The repetitive information of 16 aa peptides was analyzed by screening of the total 5 432 peptide sequences in the P. vivax data-base. A total of 22 peptides were identified as candidate peptides from the top 1 000 repetitive peptides by linear B cell epitope pre-diction on the BcePred website. Through clustering analysis and similarity comparison,five potential P. vivax specific peptides were selected,synthesized and then coupled with KLH to immunize the mice. The antibody titers of the immunized mice induced by the 5 peptides were all above 1:9 000. Conclusion The method for predicting and screening of specific peptides of P. vivax based on repetitive protein sequences and linear B cell epitope has been established successfully,and all the 5 peptides obtained by the method can induce the high titer antibody in mice.