A Novel Chimeric Antigen as a Vaccine Candidate against Leishmania major: in silico Analysis

Background: leishmania is a mandatory intracellular pathogen and causing ne-glected disease. hence, protection against leishmaniasis by a development vaccine is an important subject. this study aimed to design a poly-epitope vaccine for cu-taneous leishmaniasis. methods: the present study was conducted in the parasitology department of tarbiat modares university, tehran, iran during 2017-2019. several bioinformatics methods at online servers were used for prediction of different aspects of poly-epitope, including, physico-chemical attributes, allergenicity, antigenicity, secondary and tertiary structures, b-cell, t-cell and mhc (i, ii) potential epitopes of lack, leif, gp63 and smt antigens of l. major. results: after designing the construct (glsl), the outputs of ptm sites demon-strated that the poly-epitope had 57 potential sites for phosphorylation. further-more, the secondary of glsl structure includes 59.42%, 20.94% and 19.63% for random coil, extended strand and alpha-helix, respectively. the glsl is an immu-nogenic protein with an acceptable antigenicity (0.8410) and non-allergen. after-ward, 20 potential epitopes of lack, leif, gp63 and smt antigens were linked by a flexible linker (sapgtp), then was synthesized, and sub-cloned in plexy– neo2. the results were confirmed the expression of 38.7 kda poly-epitope in se-cretory and cytosolic sites, separately. conclusion: a good expression in the l. tarentulae and confirmation of the glsl poly-epitope could be a basis for developing a vaccine candidate against leishmani-asis that should be confirmed via experimental tests in balb/c mice.