PREDICTION AND EVALUATION OF THE B-CELL EPITOPE PEPTIDES FOR carO OF A. baumannii

Acinetobacter baumannii is undoubtedly one of the most successful pathogens responsible for hospital-acquired nosocomial infections in the modern healthcare system. Due to the prevalence of infections and outbreaks caused by multi-drug resistant A. baumannii, few antibiotics are effective for treating infections caused by this pathogen. To overcome this problem, knowledge of the pathogenesis and antibiotic resistance mechanisms of A. baumannii is important. Using various tools online such as IEDB and BepiPred the possible epitopes were found and were checked for their allergenicity (AlgPred), solubility (SolPro), toxigenicity (ToxinPred) and most importantly antigenicity (AntigenPro). The results of these tests showed that three of the eight predicted epitopes were non allergens, non toxic, soluble and antigenic. An attempt on detecting few putative vaccine peptides targeting the carO gene in A.baumannii using Bioinformatics approach suggests promising results in the present study showing three epitope peptides as promising vaccine candidates to combat the menace of drug resistance.