Leveraging a Validated in silico Approach to Elucidate Genotype-Specific VP7 Epitopes and Antigenic Relationships of Porcine Rotavirus A.

ABSTRACT: Rotavirus A (RVA) remains one of the most widespread causes of diarrheal disease and mortality in piglets despite decades of research and efforts to boost lactogenic immunity for passive protection. Genetic changes at B cell epitopes (BCEs) may be driving failure of lactogenic immunity, which relies on production of IgA antibodies to passively neutralize RVA within the piglet gut, yet little research has mapped epitopes to swine-specific strains of RVA. Here we describe a bioinformatic approach to predict BCEs on the VP7 outer capsid protein using sequence data alone. We first validated the approach using a previously published dataset of VP7-specific cross-neutralization titers, and found that amino acid changes at predicted BCEs on the VP7 protein allowed for accurate recapitulation of a

SUBMITTER: Shepherd FK 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7411229 | biostudies-literature | 2020

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature