Design of a novel multiepitope vaccine against Chlamydia pneumoniae using the extracellular protein as a target

Abstract Chlamydia pneumoniae (C. pneumoniae) infection in humans is universal and causes various respiratory infectious diseases, making a safe and effective preventive vaccine essential. In this study, a multi-epitope vaccine with CTLA-4 extracellular structure was constructed by an immunoinformatics approach. Since MOMP protein is the major extracellular protein in C. pneumoniae and has good immunogenicity and high conservation, we selected the MOMP protein of C. pneumoniae as the antigen target, predicted the T and B cell epitopes of the MOMP protein and then connected the CTLA-4 extracellular structure with the predicted dominant epitopes by various linkers to construct a multi-epitope vaccine. The biochemical characterization of the multi-epitope vaccine showed its immunogenicity and anti-allergic properties. The tertiary structure of this vaccine, along with molecular docking, molecular dynamics simulation, and principal component analysis, showed that the multi-epitope vaccine structure interacted with B7 (B7-1, B7-2) and toll-like receptors (TLR-2, TLR-4). Ultimately, the vaccine was cloned and effectively expressed in silico on an insect baculovirus expression vector (pFastBac1). These analyses showed that the designed vaccine could potentially target antigen-presenting cells and was immune to C. pneumoniae, which provided novel strategies for developing the vaccine.