Immunology Letters
Volume 119, Issues 1–2, 15 August 2008, Pages 71-77
Xiaohua Wang, Wei Xu, Deyan Tong, Jing Ni, Haifeng Gao, Ying Wang, Yiwei Chu, Pingping Li, Xiaoming Yang, Sidong Xiong.
Abstract
Epitope-based vaccines designed to induce antibody responses specific for severe acute respiratory syndrome-associated coronavirus (SARS-CoV) are being developed as a means for increasing vaccine potency. In this study, we identified four B cell epitopes from the spike (S) and membrane (M) protein through bioinformatics analysis and constructed a multi-epitope DNA vaccine. Intramuscular immunization of mice with this vaccine was sufficient to induce specific prime as well as a long-term memory humoral immune response to at least two candidate epitopes, S437–459 and M1–20. A DNA prime–protein boost strategy greatly enhanced the antibody generation and the immune sera not only reacted with the lysates of SARS-CoV-infected Vero cells but also neutralized the cytopathic effect of SARS by 75% at 1:160 dilution. The novel immunogenic S protein peptide revealed in this study provides new target for SARS vaccine design; and our work indicated multi-epitope DNA vaccine as an effective means for eliciting polyvalent humoral immune response against SARS-CoV.
Keywords
SARS-CoV, Epitope, DNA vaccine, Antibody, Prime–boost