Prediction of epitopes of Neisseria Gonorrhoeae against USA human leukocyte antigen background: An immunoinformatic approach towards development of future vaccines for USA population

Abstract Gonorrheal infections are the second most prevalent sexually transmitted diseases STDs in the USA populations after Chlamydia. These infections have now become an urgent problem to address because Neisseria gonorrhoeae is capable of developing resistance to multiple antibiotic classes. Infection with these antibiotic-resistant strains has become the major public health concern. Although extensive researches are ongoing to control its transmission and to develop the productive treatments against this pathogen, no effective vaccine could develop till now. The present study will effectively contribute to the future designing of USA specific epitope-based vaccines. Through computational approaches, this study has highlighted putative epitopes from Neisseria gonorrhoeae which restrict maximally to the frequent HLA alleles in the USA populations. Antigenic and non-allergenic nature of predicted epitopes was verified using vexijen and AllerTOP tools respectively. Total seven epitopes, four from class-I and three from class-II were antigenic as well as non-allergenic. These epitopes showed USA population coverage of 99.3% with no allergenic response. Still, additional studies are needed to validate the immunogenic properties of the predicted epitopes which are likely vaccine target for gonorrhoea in the USA populations.