Background and Aim: Coccidiosis is caused by various species of Eimeria, a protozoan parasite belonging to the phylum Epicomplexa.This disease is one of the common diseases in poultry that causes major economic losses all over the world. Due to the experience of economic loss in production and prevention of the disease and occurrence of chemical resistance, researches have been shifted toward alternative approaches such as immunologic methods. Vaccine preparation is an alternative way in which choosing an 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 IMP-1 and AMA-1 proteins of Eimeria 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 thoseusing suitable linkers.
Conclusion: Using immunoinformatic tools, we predicted the characteristics of two genes of Eimeria strains as fused potent vaccine candidates namely, AMA-1 and IMP-1.