Author(s)

Hua Zhong, Wei Zhao, Liang Peng, Shan-Feng Li, Hong Cao

Department of Microbiology, School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, Southern Medical University, Guangzhou, Guangdong 510515, China.
Department of Microbiology, School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, Southern Medical University, Guangzhou, Guangdong 510515, China..

The major envelope glycoprotein E of dengue (DEN) virus plays a central role in the biology of flaviviruses. It is capable of inducing a protective immune response in vivo and responsible for the viral binding to the cellular receptor. The crystal structures of glycoprotein E ectodomains have already been determined. However, it is still un-clear where the well-defined B-cell epitopes for glycoprotein E which induce the neutralizing an-tibodies locates. Thus, in order to characterize the role of glycoprotein E in the pathogenesis of dengue virus infection, we first used network servers (http://bio.dfci. harvard.edu/Tools/ & http://www. imtech. res. in) to predict and analyze the well defined B-cell and T-cell epitopes of the glycoprotein of the DEN-1 HAWAII strain. Then based on the highly conserved envelop glyco-protein amino acids, the hydrophilicity, antigenic-ity, accessibility and flexibility of envelop glyco-protein E were further predicted by using Biotic softwares (DNASTAR) and network servers (http://bio. dfci.harvard.edu/Tools/), the secondary structure was putatively obtained. In our study, the sequence at 281-295 amino acid (aa) for den-gue virus type 1 HAWAII strain and the sequence at 345-359, 383-397 for dengue virus type 2 NGC strain were predicted as the more prevalent epi-topes by using multiple parameters and different analysis softwares, respectively. Two epitopes of DEN-2 and one of DEN-1 locate on the domain Ш and domainⅡ of the protein E, respectively. Sub-sequently, further studies will be carried out to examine the antigenicity and protection of the synthetic peptides with higher scores in the av-erage antigen index (AI) and better hydrophilic properties determined by our data.

Dengue Virus, Glycoprotein E, Epitope, Bioinformatics

Zhong, H. , Zhao, W. , Peng, L. , Li, S. and Cao, H. (2009) Bioinformatics analysis and characteristics of envelop glycoprotein E epitopes of dengue virus. Journal of Biomedical Science and Engineering, 2, 123-127. doi: 10.4236/jbise.2009.22022.