PREDICTING THE EFFECTIVENESS OF NOVOVAX (NVXCoV2373) AGAINST THE SARS CoV-2 MUTATIONS: AN IN SILICO ANALYSIS USING LINEAR B-CELL EPITOPE PREDICTION

Abstract

The current COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in almost 45 lakh cases of infection in people with infected patients in over 200 countries, with an overall death rate of nearly 7%, resulting in partial or complete isolation of various countries. Generally, in predicting epitopes, the primary goal emphasizes the interaction of MHC molecule to thepeptide antigen. For practical reasons, the identification of epitopes in antigens is very interesting, including, understanding the root cause of the disease, immunemonitoring, the development of diagnostic assays, and the epitope-based vaccine construction. The B cell epitopes has various application, including analysing the antigen-antibody complex3D structure, using a peptide library to detect antibody binding, or using a specific diagnostic test. In this paper we aim to find out the NOVOVAX vaccine efficiency against the different covid strains namely Beta, Delta, Mu, Iota, Kappa. Novovax is a protein based vaccine which is being developed by Novavax (Gaithersburg, USA) and Covovax is the brand name of the same vaccine which is being evaluated in India. Therefore bepipred which a newl tool for estimating linear B-cell epitopes was used as it utilises the sequence as input and predicts the positive epitopes. The bepipred result of all the prediction obtained from the vaccine and from the different strains were computed. The result show’s that kappa variants has maximum i.e. 12 similar peptide sequence with the vaccine and therefore NOVOVAX will be more effective against the kappa strain of corona virus, the other 4 different strains have lesser matching petide i.e mu has 10 matching epitopes, delta has 8, iota has 7 similar peptide chains and the beta variant has only 5 similar epitopic peptide sequence. As a result, just one method to prevent the outbreak is to broadly supply safe and effective vaccines for spreading strains over the globe.