Designing of potential vaccine candidates of fused cathepsin L and tropomyosin genes of Rhipicephalus (Boophilus) annulatus tick larva

Introduction: Regarding emerging tick resistance against acaricides, researches have been shifted toward alternative approaches such as immunologic methods. Vaccine preparation is an alternative way in which choosing appropriate protein with high immune induction potency is a prerequisite. In addition according to studies, using more than one protein could better enhance the immune induction and antibody production. Choosing immunogenic epitopes from selected proteins and adjoining them with a suitable linker is one of the novel approaches in vaccine design. Materials and methods: Based on the fact that both cathepsin and tropomyosin proteins of Rhipicephalus tick were previously recognized as potent immunogenic antigens, we predicted the immunogenic epitopes of these proteins by immunoinformatic methods. Among studied epitopes, those that were met by multiple bioinformatics tools were used. Results: Finally, the polytopic construction was designed by assembling the selected epitopes and connecting them with linkers. Conclusion: Using immunoinformatic tools, we predicted the characteristics of two genes of Rhipicephalus annulatus tick larva as fused potent vaccine candidates namely, cathepsin and tropomyosin.