An immunoinformatics study to explore HTL epitopes for fungal pathogen Aspergillus lentulus

Aspergillus lentulus causes invasive aspergillosis and is responsible for harmful impact on human health, as it targets pulmonary sites and causes impaired respiration. Aspergilli mycotoxins too have a significant negative influence on human and animal health. Here, we found T-cell epitopes from membrane proteins of A. lentulus and targeted them against MHC-Class II alleles to predict putative immunogenic nature. In this study, immunoinformatics tools like PatchDock, NetMHCII server, Molprobity, ProSA, ToxinPred, ClusPro tool, iMODS server and ProtParam were used to conduct the epitopes screening. Here we finalized four epitopes GENGVNQLQGTTLGR, ITNYFSTQKLGSSSQ, YITNYFSTQKLGSSS, and PADYTSTARALSLPM, that interacts with MHC-Class II alleles and were found to show better population coverage and stability in the docked complexes. The immunoinformatics study was found to be very novel method in rapid designing of vaccines; it is an efficient way to reduce hit and trial approaches. Here we finalized four epitopes against this harmful pathogen that can elicit immune responses in host.