LAUSR

Human papillomavirus type 16 (HPV-16) is one of the most important cause of developing cervical cancer. Therefore, effective epitope-based vaccine design for HPV-16 would be of major medical benefit. The aim of our study was to identify B and T cell epitopes of HPV-16 L1 protein. In this study, the HPV-16 L1 gene was isolated from HPV recovered from five vaginal swab samples using specific primers and finally sequenced. The ExPASy translate tool (http://web.expasy.org/ translate/) was used to convert nucleotide sequence into amino acid sequence. Bioinformatic analysis was employed to predict suitable B and T cell epitopes and immunogenicity, allergenicity and toxicity of predicted epitopes were then evaluated. Afterwards, the selected T-cell epitopes were docked using Molegro Virtual Docker software. The two epitopes 207 AMDFTTLQA215 and 200 MVDTGFGAM208 have showed a very strong binding affinity to HLA-A0201 and HLA-B3501 molecules, respectively. Outcome of B-cell epitope prediction showed that epitope 475 KAKPKFTLGKRK ATPTTSSTSTTAKRKK502 contained overlapped epitope which might be the epitope associated with production of neutralizing antibody response. Based on this finding, the predicted B and T cell epitopes are promising targets for epitope-based vaccine development against HPV-16. Further in vivo and in vitro experiments are needed to confirm our findings. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.