COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS TO DETERMINE THE EFFICACY OF PEPTIDE VACCINE AGAINST DIFFERENT STRAINS OF SARS-COV-2

Abstract

SARS CoV-2 is a global threat these days and has been declared as a pandemic by WHO. With the passage of time from 2019 to 2021 different variants of the SARS CoV2 have been reported due to mutations in the S glycoprotein of the SARS CoV-2. Vaccines are being developed by different institutes and organization to prevent/ inhibit the further destruction by the coronavirus. Out of the vaccines synthesised using various approaches the protein subunit vaccines are easy to manufacture and do not trigger other immunologic reactions. Since the s glycoprotein of the COVID-19 is the most immunologic component amongst the complete virion and is an essential site for vaccine design. Due to this reason in our study we focused on the NVX-CoV-2373 which a peptide based sub unit vaccines with sequence similar to the S Glycoprotein of the virus except the dual mutations and it alters the binding of surface glycoprotein of virus to hACE2 of host and produces both humoral and cellular immunity in host. But this vaccine has not been authorized by all the countries, so here, we have used an in silico approach to determine the efficacy of the vaccine against few strains of SARS- 6 CoV-2 by identifying the similarities between the S glycoprotein sequence of the vaccine and the variants by performing Blast which is followed by the linear B cell epitope prediction using Bepipred 2.0 and the results obtained were analysed for similarity. It was found that the maximum number of epitopes of the Lambda variants were identical to the NVX-Cov-2373 vaccine.