Sharmin R, Islam ABMMK. Conserved antigenic sites between MERS-CoV and Bat-coronavirus are revealed through sequence analysis.
Source Code Biol Med 2016;
11:3. [PMID:
26962326 PMCID:
PMC4784407 DOI:
10.1186/s13029-016-0049-7]
[Citation(s) in RCA: 2] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 05/21/2015] [Accepted: 02/26/2016] [Indexed: 11/23/2022]
Abstract
Background
MERS-CoV is a newly emerged human coronavirus reported closely related with HKU4 and HKU5 Bat coronaviruses. Bat and MERS corona-viruses are structurally related. Therefore, it is of interest to estimate the degree of conserved antigenic sites among them. It is of importance to elucidate the shared antigenic-sites and extent of conservation between them to understand the evolutionary dynamics of MERS-CoV.
Results
Multiple sequence alignment of the spike (S), membrane (M), enveloped (E) and nucleocapsid (N) proteins was employed to identify the sequence conservation among MERS and Bat (HKU4, HKU5) coronaviruses. We used various in silico tools to predict the conserved antigenic sites. We found that MERS-CoV shared 30 % of its S protein antigenic sites with HKU4 and 70 % with HKU5 bat-CoV. Whereas 100 % of its E, M and N protein’s antigenic sites are found to be conserved with those in HKU4 and HKU5.
Conclusion
This sharing suggests that in case of pathogenicity MERS-CoV is more closely related to HKU5 bat-CoV than HKU4 bat-CoV. The conserved epitopes indicates their evolutionary relationship and ancestry of pathogenicity.
Electronic supplementary material
The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s13029-016-0049-7) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
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