Reverse Vaccinology - Computational Approach

Computational Approach

The basic idea behind reverse vaccinology is that an entire pathogenic genome can be screened using bioinformatics approaches to find genes. Some of the traits that the genes are monitored for that may indicate antigenecity include genes that code for proteins with extracellular localization, signal peptides, and B-cell epitopes. Next, those genes are filtered for desirable attributes that would make good vaccine targets such as outer membrane proteins. Those proteins then undergo normal wet lab testing for immune responses.

Though using bioinformatic technology to develop vaccines has become typical in the past ten years, general laboratories often do not have the advanced software that can do this. However, there are a growing number of programs making reverse vaccinology information more accessible. NERVE is one relatively new dataprocessing software. Though it must be downloaded and does not include all epitope predictions, it does help save some time by combining the computational steps of reverse vaccinology into one program. Vaxign, an even more comprehensive program, was created in 2008. Vaxign is web-based and completely public-access.

Though Vaxign has been found to be extremely accurate and efficient, some scientists still utilize the online software RANKPEP for the peptide bonding predictions. Both Vaxign and RANKPEP employ PSSMs (Position Specific Scoring Matrices) when analyzing protein sequences or sequence alignments.

Computer Aided bioinformatics projects are becoming extremely popular, as they help guide the laboratory experiments.