Clara T Schoeder, Pavlo Gilchuk, Amandeep K Sangha, Kaitlyn V Ledwitch, Delphine C Malherbe, Xuan Zhang, Elad Binshtein, Lauren E Williamson, Cristina E Martina, Jinhui Dong, Erica Armstrong, Rachel Sutton, Rachel Nargi, Jessica Rodriguez, Natalia Kuzmina, Brooke Fiala, Neil P King, Alexander Bukreyev, James E Crowe, Jens Meiler
The three human pathogenic ebolaviruses: Zaire (EBOV), Bundibugyo (BDBV), and Sudan (SUDV) viruses, cause severe disease with high fatality rates. Epitopes of ebolavirus glycoprotein (GP) recognized by antibodies with binding breadth for all three ebolaviruses are of major interest for rational vaccine design. In particular, the heptad repeat 2 -membrane-proximal external region (HR2-MPER) epitope is relatively conserved between EBOV, BDBV, and SUDV GP and targeted by human broadly-neutralizing antibodies. To study whether this epitope can serve as an immunogen for the elicitation of broadly-reactive antibody responses, protein design in Rosetta was employed to transplant the HR2-MPER epitope identified from a co-crystal structure with the known broadly-reactive monoclonal antibody (mAb) BDBV223 onto smaller scaffold proteins...
May 18, 2022: PLoS Pathogens