Research Article
Pawan Sharma and Ajay Kumar
Abstract
Influenza (H1N1) is a highly contagious respiratory pathogen that continues to evolve and threaten both veterinary and human public health. Presently existing vaccines against in fl uenza (H1N1) are based on the generation of secondary response in form of neutralizing antibody primarily directed against surface proteins– hemagglutinin and neuraminidase. In this work, Propred and Propred I immunoinformatics tools have been used to predict the T cell epitopes from seven putative protein viz. Hemagglutinin ,neuraminidase, polymerase PA ,nucleocapsid protein, matrix protein, polymerase PB1, polymerase PB2 of in fl uenza virus A/Minnesota/2009 (H1N1). Total of 15 epitopes were predicted for HLA class I and 14 epitopes for HLA class II molecules. These epitopes are found top scoring peptides and showed binding with maximum number of HLA alleles. The threshold percent taken in this analysis was 4% to select high af fi nity peptides by Propred and Propred I. The predicted epitopes may be served as a useful diagnostic reagent for evaluating T-cell responses in the context of natural infection and also might be helpful for designing of either a DNA vaccine or a subunit vaccine against H1N1in fl uenza.