Rapid Fire Presentation 8th International Conference on Plasmodium vivax Research 2022

An integrative approach in identifying potential antigenic proteins of Plasmodium vivax via genome-wide screening (#207)

Shalini Aggarwal 1 , Utpalendu Paul 2 , Amit Karmakar 3 , Sanjana Krishnakumar 4 , Suvin Shetty 5 , Swati Patankar 1 , Sanjeeva Srivastava 1
  1. Department of Biosciences and Bioengineering, IIT Bombay, Mumbai , Maharashtra, India
  2. Department of Biotechnology, Vellore Institute of Technology, Vellore, Vellore, Tamil Nadu, India
  3. Department of Botany, Siksha Bhavana, Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, West Bengal, India
  4. Department of Life Sciences and Biochemistry, St. Xavier's (Autonomous), Mumbai, Maharashtra, India
  5. Dr. L H Hiranandani Hospital, Mumbai, Maharashtra, India

Plasmodium vivax (Pv) which is the causative agent of Vivax Malaria (VM) is the second most prevalent cause of malaria in humans. The development of therapeutics against malaria faces major impediments due to the poor understanding of parasite biology and the high cost of vaccine research and clinical trials. The focus on improving immunogenicity and minimizing risks has received prime importance for the development of novel strategies for effective therapeutic applications against VM. The study focuses on a reverse vaccinology concept where in silico mining of P. vivax Sal1 proteome was performed to investigate the highly antigenic parasite proteins of VM, which are then correlated with the corroborative findings from immunoassay on clinically extracted Pv. A publicly available Plasmodium dataset was mined to investigate the P. vivax proteome (5536, PlasmoDB v54). The parasite proteome was further studied comprehensively using an in silico-based pipeline to identify potential antigenic parasite proteins by identifying signal peptides, GPI-anchored proteins, antigenicity, and physiochemical properties. Among the 5536 parasite proteins, 32 proteins were antigenic (threshold >0.5), and 11 out of 32 proteins were both stable (instability index <40.0) and water-soluble. Five proteins were found to be highly antigenic (antigenicity threshold >1.0) and were identified to contain naturally disordered regions, which plays important role in the development of immune response. Comparison to the in silico analysis with Venkatesh et al. 2019, findings and targeted protein analysis via immunoassay, revealed four proteins as the common antigenic parasite proteins. These parasite proteins were associated with pathogenesis-related expression in Pv. The identified proteins or combinations of their fragments may provide further insights into therapeutic applications.