Bioinformatic Anaysis of Multi-epitope Protein Designed Based on Highly Conserved Regions of Hemagglutinin Protein of H9N2 and H5N8 Influenza Virus Strains

Vaccination against bird flu H9N2/H5N8 is considered as an effective strategy to deal with and control these deadly pathogens. For this purpose, in this study, an effective dual chimeric vaccine against H9/H5 from the bidirectional HA2 region of H9N2 and H5N8 was designed and analyzed using bioinformatics models, physicochemical characteristics and antigenic structure analysis of selected epitopes.To carry out this study, (A/chicken/Iran/B308B/2004) H9N2 and (A/Poultry/Iran/clade 2344/2018) H5N8 strains were selected and the epitopes stimulating B and T lymphocytes were investigated and the most suitable ones were selected. Then a chimeric vaccine was designed by combining highly immunogenic epitopes. In the following, using related software, the physicochemical characteristics and secondary structure of the designed vaccine were evaluated in terms of thermal stability, hydrophilicity, isoelectric pH, antigenicity and allergenicity. Finally, the proposed vaccine was reverse transcribed and adapted to be placed in the prokaryotic expression vector pET-41 a(+). According to the results, it is predicted that the antigenic structure designed in this study can be expressed successfully in prokaryotic systems and use for immunogenic studies against H5N8 and H9N2 strains of influenza virus.