Análise computacional do genoma de Schistosoma mansoni para identificação de proteínas potencialmente imunogênicas

Abstract

Schistosomiasis continues to be a significant public health problem in tropical countries including Brazil. The disease caused by the parasite Schistosoma mansoni, is the second main cause of morbity in the world among parasitc diseases, right after malaria. In the present research work, we describe the development of an approach aiming discovering vaccine candidates for schistosomiasis using computational resources. The main purpose for this approach was the prediction of antigenic proteins from the genome of the target organism. Among the various predictions made are those that determine wich the proteins which are exposed to human host (secreted and transmembrane proteins). The selected proteins were further submitted to epitope prediction. Such analysis resulted in 90 proteins with good immunogenic potential, that encouraged some experimental validations still under development. This a work encouraged the creation of a pipeline that involves all the predictions made in the project, provided in the form of a web-server (EpiFinder: http://epifinder.cebio.org). In conclusion, we expected to contribute to the discovery of new targets for vaccine more quickly and effectively not only in schistosomiasis, but also other parasites.