Reverse vaccinology and molecular docking as tools to identify potential vaccine candidates against drug-resistant Mycobacterium tuberculosis and Mycobacterium bovis

Abstract

The emergence of multi-drug-resistant Mycobacterium tuberculosis (M.tb) and Mycobacterium bovis (M.bovis), the causative agents of Tuberculosis (TB) and zoonotic TB respectively are of significant threat to public health. TB was the leading cause of death globally from a single infectious pathogen until COVID-19. Bacillus Calmette–Guérin (BCG), the sole currently licensed vaccine in use has variable efficacy, protecting effectively against childhood TB plus extra-pulmonary TB but not active Pulmonary TB. Developing potential vaccines with long-lasting efficacy might solve this problem and avert multi-drug resistance numbers. We applied reverse vaccinology and molecular docking approaches to identify potential vaccine candidates from Ugandan globally available drug-resistant M. tuberculosis and M. bovis proteomes. The study used a conserved protein sequence to predict B-cell and T-cell epitopes and developed a multi-epitope vaccine insilico. We identified nine vaccine candidates with low global binding energies ranging from -12.91 to -30.26, and 23.82 for the multi-epitope vaccine. The multi-epitope vaccine candidate elicited both humoral and cellular responses on insilico simulation warranting it as a potential tuberculosis vaccine candidate. We recommend for more studies be done on the conserved protein tr|A0A1R3XWZ9|A0A1R3XWZ9_MYCBO as a potential vaccine candidate protein.