Abstract

Nithiyanandan Saravanan, Prashanth Rajendiran, Mageshbabu Ramamurthy*, Balaji Nandagopal, Swarnalatha Purushotham

ABSTRACT

The emergence and rapid spread of corona virus disease 2019 (COVID-19), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2), the case fatality rate is estimated to range from 2 to 3%. Prevention entails home isolation of suspected cases and those with mild illnesses and strict infection control measures at hospitals that include contact and droplet precautions. At this time, there are no specific vaccines or treatments for COVID-19. However, there are many ongoing clinical trials evaluating potential treatments. So far, the real-time PCR is the gold standard clinical diagnosis method of COVID-19 is nucleic acid detection in the nasal and throat swab sampling or other respiratory tract samplings. The novel Corona virus disease virions are surrounded by a lipid bilayer from which spike protein trimers. The Spike proteins are known to play major role in corona virus pathogenesis, and antibodies against linear epitopes are protective against COVID-19 infection so the spike protein peptides are most sensitive peptides for serodiagnosis. In this Corona virus Spike protein’s (Indian strains) consensus sequence was used in BepiPred 2.0, ABCpred, and IEDB analysis resource for the B cell epitope prediction. Based on the bioinformatics program results one epitope of 16mer HTPINLVRDLPQGFSA was recognized in the highly conserved regions of spike protein with 81% surface exposed residues. The identified candidate peptide could be used for screening antibody response in patients who have had COVID-19. This study could help us to use the predicted peptide as an immunogenic for the development of diagnostics and vaccines against COVID-19.