Research Article Open Access Abdelbagi et al., Immunome Res 2017, 13:2 DOI: 10.4172/1745-7580.1000135 Research Article Open Access Immunome Research I m m u n o me R e s e a r c h ISSN: 1745-7580 Volume 13 • Issue 2 • 1000135 Immunome Res, an open access journal ISSN: 1745-7580 Keywords: African horse sickness; Diptera; Protein; Immunogenicity; Virus Introduction African horse sickness (AHS) is a viral disease of equidae (Horses, Bonnies, zebras and donkeys) transmitted by hematophagous Culicoides midges (Diptera, Ceratopogonidae) and classiied as an A-list infectious disease of the Oice International des Epizooties (OIE) with important economic consequence for the horse trade [1-3]. he disease caused by this virus is characterized by mild to high fever, respiratory symptoms, severe weight loss, lethargy, rough hair, apathy and can eventually lead to death [4-7]. he morbidity and mortality rate is very high in infected animals and reaches up to 95% in horses [3,8-11]. (AHS) disease is endemic in sub-Saharan Africa. here were sporadic outbreaks in North Africa, Spain in 1969, Portugal in 1987 and the Middle East with few outbreaks recorded in India and Pakistan [10-13]. In the last decade the disease has emerged in diferent African countries such as the (AHSV-2) in Senegal and Nigeria in 2007, Ethiopia in 2008 and 2010 and Ghana in 2010, (AHSV-4) in Kenya in 2007 and (AHSV-7) in Senegal in 2007 [11,12] as well as in Sudan that has frequently reported AHS disease in imported race and breeding horses [14]. More recently outbreaks were recorded in Southern Africa in 2013 and 2014 [11,12] and the recent efects of climate change further increase the risk of virus introduction into Europe, where the insect vector also occurs [8,11]. African horse sickness virus (AHSV) is considered as the *Corresponding author: Malaz Abdelbagi, Department of pharmaceutics, Faculty of Pharmaceuticals, University of Khartoum, Khartoum, Sudan, E-mail: Drmalaz77@hotmail.com Received March 16, 2016; Accepted May 29, 2017; Published June 05, 2017 Citation: Abdelbagi M, Hassan T, Shihabeldin M, Bashir S, Ahmed E, et al. (2017) Immunoinformatics Prediction of Peptide-Based Vaccine Against African Horse Sickness Virus. Immunome Res 13: 135. doi: 10.4172/17457580.1000135 Copyright: © 2017 Abdelbagi M, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Abstract Background: African horse sickness (AHS) is a viral disease of equidae. It is transmitted by hematophagous Culicoides midges (Diptera, Ceratopogonidae) and causes severe disease in horse that can lead to death. African Horse Sickness Virus (AHSV) is a double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) virus with ten genome segments encoding seven structural proteins (VP1-VP7) and four non-structural proteins (NS1, NS2, NS3, NS3A). The aim of this study is to analyze (VP2) protein of the African Horse Sickness Virus (AHSV) strains reported in the National Center for Biotechnology Information database (NCBI) database to select all possible epitopes that can be used to design a peptide vaccine. Materials and methods: A total of 27 outer capsid protein (VP2) sequences of African Horse Sickness Virus (AHSV) were retrieved from the National Center for Biotechnology Information database (NCBI) (https://www.ncbi.nlm. nih.gov/protein/?term=VP2+African+horse+sickness+virus) in the 7 th of September 2016. On them, several tests were conducted using Immune Epitope Analysis Database (IEDB) to detect the highly conserved immunogenic epitopes of B and T cells from which all possible epitopes that can be used as a therapeutic peptide vaccine to be selected. Results and Discussion: Regarding epitopes that would elicit an antibody immune response, “FSPEYY, DKVVEDPESY and YDTDQNVV “were proposed to stimulate B cell. While 5 epitopes for each MHC I and II were addressed as potentially promising epitopes as they bound the highest number of alleles, all these epitopes were found to have a high binding afinity and the lowest binding energy to equine MHC class I molecule (ELA-A3) haplotype in the structural level. The epitopes “YAYCLILAL and YTFGNKFLL” were represented because they were bound to the largest number of alleles. In spite of binding to 4 alleles the epitope WFFDYYATL was represented because it has the lowest global energy. To our knowledge there is no epitope based vaccine for the African Horse Sickness Virus (AHSV) using in silico approaches. Immunoinformatics Prediction of Peptide-Based Vaccine Against African Horse Sickness Virus Malaz Abdelbagi 1 *, Tarteel Hassan 1 , Mohammed Shihabeldin 2 , Sanaa Bashir 1 , Elkhaleel Ahmed 1 , Elmoez Mohamed 3 , Shawgi Haiz 1 , Abdah Abdelmonim 4 , Tassneem Hamid 1 , Shimaa Awad 1 , Ahmed Hamdi 5 , Khoubieb Ali 6 and Mohammed A. Hassan 5 1 Department of Pharmaceutics, Faculty of Pharmaceuticals, University of Khartoum, Khartoum, Sudan 2 Department of Medical Microbiology, Faculty of Medical Laboratory Sciences, Sudan International University, Sudan 3 Faculty of Medical Laboratory Sciences, Omdurman Islamic University, Sudan 4 Department of Medical Laboratory Sciences, Elrazi University, Sudan 5 Department of Industrial Biotechnology, Africa City of Technology, Sudan 6 Department of Pharmaceutical Technology, University of Medical Science and Technology, Sudan etiological agent of African Horse Sickness. It has nine antigenically diferent identiied serotypes that belongs to the Orbivirus genus of the Reoviridae family [3,8,9,15,16]. (AHSV) is a double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) virus with ten genome segments encoding seven structural proteins (VP1-VP7) and four non-structural proteins (NS1, NS2, NS3, NS3A) [1,6]. here are two major outer capsid structural proteins in the African horse sickness virus; (VP2) and (VP5) [10,17]. (VP2) is the major protective antigen of (AHSV) that is responsible for the serotype formation. he majority of neutralizing epitopes are located on (VP2) which can be considered as the main target of immune response to the virus [11-13,17,18]. Previous studies targeted developing or producing an efective vaccine has used diferent types of approaches. Polyvalent live attenuated vaccine (LAV) that is used to control the disease in Africa was proposed to be