Immunoinformatics and Its Role in Microbes and Vaccines

With the burgeoning immunological data in the scientific literature, scientists increasingly rely on bioinformatics applications well developed for some immunological areas, to inform and enhance their work [1, 2]. There is an agreeable synergy between the growing collections in immune-related databases such as GenBank/GenPept, EMBL/TrEMBL, DDBJ/DAD, PIR, SWISS-PROT, PDB, PROSITE, etc. among which the IMGT database contains high quality annotations of DNA and protein sequence of Ig, TCR and MHC. These computational tools contribute to improved understanding of immune responses, and evolution of pathogens under immune pressure. For development of immunoinformatics tools we need the integration of immunological database with generic interfaces and also the integration of system level mathematical models with molecular level models leading to application in fields such as development of novel therapeutic regimens, vaccine designing and disease management [1, 2]. A number of computational methods have been developed to identify MHC-binding peptides and their subset of T-cell epitopes that helps improve our understanding of specificity of immune responses which is important for discovery of vaccines and immunotherapies [6, 7]. These computational methods consist of a variety of statistical and machine learning approaches making computational prescreening of antigens for CTL epitopes a standard approach in epitope-mapping studies [7]. Selection of antigen sequences as essential T-cell epitopes of supertype human leukocyte antigen (HLA) alleles lead to production of, T-cell epitope based vaccines [3]. A web server, PEPVAC (Promiscuous EPitope-based VACcine), was used for formulation of multi-epitope vaccines with broad population coverage [4]. In Dengue viruses (DENV) study, sequence fragments that were conserved across the majority of available DENV sequences evaluated their relevance as candidate vaccine targets, using various bioinformatics-based methods (NCBI Entrez protein database) and immune assay [5]. Plants lack mobile defender cells and a somatic adaptive immune system. They rely on the innate immunity of each cell and on systemic signals emanating from infection sites [8].The plant innate immunity consist of PTI (PAM triggered immunity) and effector-triggered immunity (ETI) which involves interactions of proteins [9]. There are many molecular switches, which regulate the plant innate immunity such as NB-ARC, HSP90, SGT1, RAR1 etc [17, 18]. The plant innate immunity also consists of elicitors such as oomycete-derived Nep1, Avr9 [25, 29] and suppressor such as Cyclic beta-(1, 2)-Glucan, Xanthan [35, 40] that help to induce or suppress the plant innate immunity. Basic concept of fragment-based drug discovery was developed about 25 years go by William Jencks and it includes building of drugs from small molecular pieces and it has a great advantage of finding new drugs [41, 42].