Computational screening and characterization of putative vaccine candidates of Plasmodium vivax

Plasmodium vivax is the most prevalent species of malaria affecting millions of people annually worldwide and demands effective interventions to develop a successful vaccine. In this milieu, we have dedicated noteworthy efforts to characterize the proteome of P. vivax to give a lead for the epitope-based vaccine development. Membrane proteins of P. vivax were collected from SWISS PROT database and 10 antigenic proteins were identified among them by in silico analysis using multiple servers. T-cell and B-cell epitopes were identified and their immunity was assessed. Their ability to trigger humoral and cell-mediated responses was determined. Three dimensional models were constructed for the antigenic proteins using Modeller, Phyre2, and Modloop tools and their quality was validated using PROCHECK and ProSA-web validation servers. Further, the binding affinity and molecular interactions of these antigenic proteins were characterized by performing protein-protein docking against transmission-blocking anti-malaria antibody Fab2A8 (PDB ID: 3S62) using Z-dock module of Discovery Studio 4.0. The presence of potential B & T-cell epitopes, major histocompatibility complex-binding sites, and their efficient interactions with Fab2A8 antibody suggests the use of predicted antigenic proteins for the construction of multi-epitope peptide vaccine against P. vivax.