Epitope - based peptide vaccine against <i>Fructose-bisphosphate aldolase (FBA)</i> of <i>Madurella mycetomatis</i> using immunoinformatics approaches

Abstract Background Mycetoma is a distinct flesh eating and destructive neglected tropical disease. It is endemic in many tropical and subtropical countries. Mycetoma is caused by bacterial infections (actinomycetoma) such as Streptomyces somaliensis and Nocardiae or true fungi (eumycetoma) such as Madurella mycetomatis. Until date, treatments fail to cure the infection and the available marketed drugs are expensive and toxic upon prolonged usage. Moreover, no vaccine was prepared yet against mycetoma. The aim of this study is to predict effective epitope-based vaccine against fructose-bisphosphate aldolase enzymes of M. mycetomatis using immunoinformatics approaches. Methods and Materials Fructose-bisphosphate aldolase of Madurella mycetomatis Sequence was retrieved from NCBI. Different prediction tools were used to analyze the nominee’s epitopes in Immune Epitope Database for B-cell, T-cell MHC class II &amp; I. Then the proposed peptides were docked using Autodock 4.0 software program. Results and Conclusions The proposed and promising peptides KYLQ shows a potent binding affinity to B-cell, FEYARKHAF with a very strong binding affinity to MHC1 alleles and FFKEHGVPL that show a very strong binding affinity to MHC11and MHC1 alleles. This indicates a strong potential to formulate a new vaccine, especially with the peptide FFKEHGVPL which is likely to be the first proposed epitope-based vaccine against Fructose-bisphosphate aldolase of Madurella mycetomatis. This study recommends an in-vivo assessment for the most promising peptides especially FFKEHGVPL.