Department of Bioinformatics

Alagappa University
Karaikudi-630 003, Tamil Nadu, India
 Bioweapon Potential

• Botulinum toxin a major threat because

– Extreme potency and lethality
– Ease of production
– Ease of transport
– Need for prolonged intensive care
• Top 6 potential biological warfare agents
• Listed as Category A agent: High priority
 Category A
• Variola major
• Bacillus anthracis
• Yersinia pestis
• Clostridium botulinum
• Francisella tularensis
• Ebola hemorrhagic fever
• Marburg hemorrhagic fever
• Lassa & Junin
Not Only Humans…
The animals also
Can do the Mass
Damage..
 Categories of Human Botulism

1. Foodborne
botulism

2. Infant botulism

3. Wound botulism

4. Adult infectious
botulism
Passive immunization - equine antitoxinAntibodies to
Types A, B and E toxins Binds and inactivates circulating
toxin Stops further damage but doesn’t reverse
Administer ASAP for best outcome Dose per package
insert Heptavalent antitoxin Investigational Effective
against all toxins
Reverse vaccinology is one of the best examples of how bioinformatics
can boost molecular immunology, the conventional approach to design
vaccines requires pathogen’s cultivation and dissection of its main
components before testing their ability to elicit protective immunity

PSORTb 2.0
HMMTOP 2.0
SIGNALp 3.0
LipoP 1.0
SecretomeP 2.0
PredTMBB
TatP 1.O
Virulentpred
BLASTP
Clostridium botulinum A str. ATCC 3502 – pedant Database
Using the reverse vaccinology methods the genome of Clostridium
botulinum A strain was analysed, the screening was done with the help
of different servers such as VirulentPred, LipoP, SecretomeP, SignalP,
PredTMBB etc, after the screening the proteins with significant scores
are selected for comparing with human genome with BLASTP, the
proteins which shows more than 80% similarity were omitted
The criteria for selection are
•Should be virulent
•Should have minimum secretomeP of 0.5
•Should contain signal peptide cleavage sites
•Should be a membrane protein
•Transmembrane helices must be minimum
•Presence of Beta barrels are significant
•Non secretory proteins are omitted
Epitope mapping results
 Peptide binding to
MHC Class II Molecules
This particular Peptide can
be act as the vaccine
candidates against the
Clostridium Botulism using
the reverse vaccinology