Application of reverse vaccinology for the identification of epitope candidates from Rickettsia rickettsii

Abstract

Rocky mountain spotted fever is a severe disease caused by Rickettsia rickettsii that frequently causes the death of the patients. As there are not effective vaccines for this disease, we employed reverse vaccinology to find epitope candidates useful for vaccine development. To apply this bioinformatics, we used the following online software: ProPred1, RANKPEP, and HLA binding, to evaluate 143 amino acid sequences in the genome of Rickettsia rickettsii (NC_009882 Sheila Smith). This strategy allowed us to identify 19 epitope sequences with affinity to HLA I alleles: A0201, A24; HLA-B: B3501, B3901.