Potential targets for immune responses to novel coronavirus have been identified, a crucial step in vaccine development.
Coronaviruses, a genus of the Coronaviridae family, are enveloped viruses with a large positive-strand RNA genome. The recently identified SARS-CoV-2, the cause of the disease known as COVID19, is one of seven coronaviruses known to infect humans. Others include SARS-CoV (which causes severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS) and MERS-CoV (which causes Middle East respiratory syndrome, or MERS). A team of scientists recently identified several epitopes in the SARS-CoV-2 virus, a crucial step in vaccine development strategies.
Epitopes are regions on viral proteins that immune cells bind to drive a targeted immune response. Most epitopes are approximately five or six amino acids in length. A typical full-length viral protein sequence may contain many different epitopes to which antibodies can bind.
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The authors of the study drew on data from the Immune Epitope Database as well as Virus Pathogen Resource, a compilation of information about known pathogenic viruses. The team compiled known epitopes from other coronaviruses, mapped the corresponding regions to SARS-CoV-2, and used the information to predict likely epitopes.
They identified several specific regions in SARS-CoV-2 that have high homology to the SARS virus, indicating that SARS-CoV is the closest related virus to SARS-CoV-2. Specifically targeting these epitopes may generate immunity to related coronaviruses and promote resistance to viral evolution.