Identification of Multi-epitopes as an effective vaccine against Chikungunya virus: An Immunoinformatics Study

Chikungunya, a virus that is transmitted to humans by the bite of an infected mosquito. Chikungunya is caused by the Chikungunya virus (CHIKV), an RNA virus belonging to the alphavirus genus and Togaviridae family. The term Chikungunya comes from the Kimakonda language and means "to become contorted." The most common symptoms include fever, headache, and joint pain that persist. Africa, Southeast Asia, India, and Brazil are endemic regions for Chikungunya fever. The primary objective of this work is to identify an effective epitope based subunit vaccine against the virus through computational analysis and a reverse vaccinology approach. T cell epitopes were predicted and evaluated for antigenicity and population coverge based on the CHIKV structural proteins. In this, the epitope PRNVELGDRKGK exhibited the highest antigenicity score of 2.4092, indicating its strong potential as an immunogenic candidate. Also, the population coverage analysis revealed its global effectiveness with 71.70% coverage. Further, protein-peptide docking of the modelled peptide with the CHIKV envelope glycoprotein identified the most stable molecular complex based on a lowest binding energy of -556.0 kcal/mol, with key interactions were visualized. This immunoinformatics investigation demonstrates that the anticipated epitopes are capable of inducing adequate antibodies against CHIKV and suggests that their epitopes can be exploited in the development of the novel effective and successful CHIKV vaccine.