Shao, C. | bioRxiv Science

bioRxiv2018

Immunogenicity and protective potency of Norovirus GII.17 virus-like particle-based vaccine

Noroviruses (NoVs) are a major cause of acute viral gastroenteritis in adults and children worldwide. Lacking of cell culture system and animals models that must be considered the virus like particles (VLPs) used as an effective vaccine development. In the present study, we investigated the expression of the major capsid protein (VP1) of Genogroup II, genotype 17 (GII.17) NoV using recombinant baculovirus system in insect cells and saliva binding blockade assay to detect their protective potency. Our results showed that GII.17 VLPs could be successfully generated in sf9 insect cells and electron microscopic revealed that GII.17 VLPs was visualized as spherical particles of -35nm in diameter. Immunized mouse with purified VLPs produced GII.17 specific sera and could efficiently block GII.17 VLPs binding to saliva histo-blood group antigens (HBGAs). Together, these results suggested that GII.17 VLPs represent a promising vaccine candidate against NoV GII.17 infection and strongly support further preclinical and clinical studies.

immunology↗

bioRxiv2018

Continuous Evaluation of Ligand Protein Predictions: A Weekly Community Challenge for Drug Docking

1Docking calculations can be used to accelerate drug discovery by providing predictions of the poses of candidate ligands bound to a targeted protein. However, studies in the literature use varied docking methods, and it is not clear which work best, either in general or for specific protein targets. In addition, a complete docking calculation requires components beyond the docking algorithm itself, such as preparation of the protein and ligand for calculations, and it is difficult to isolate which aspects of a method are most in need of improvement. To address such issues, we have developed the Continuous Evaluation of Ligand Protein Predictions (CELPP), a weekly blinded challenge for automated docking workflows. Participants in CELPP create a workflow to predict protein-ligand binding poses, which is then tasked with predicting 10-100 new (never before released) protein-ligand crystal structures each week. CELPP evaluates the accuracy of each workflows predictions and posts the scores online. CELPP is a new cyberinfrastructure resource to identify the strengths and weaknesses of current approaches, help map docking problems to the algorithms most likely to overcome them, and illuminate areas of unmet need in structure-guided drug design.

biophysics↗