Essay Example on Zika virus is a member of Flavivirus family

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Zika virus is member of Flavivirus family and belongs to the Flavivirus genus like other flaviviruses Zika virus is an icosahedral enveloped single stranded RNA virus The lipid envelope is covered with dense projections that consist of a membrane and envelope glycoproteins First identified in Uganda in 1947 and it is transmitted by Aedes mosquitoes which is also responsible for Dengue fever Yellow fever and Chikungunya virus A mosquito bites an infected person and then passes those viruses to other people it bites Zika virus is also a sexually transmitted and also it is transmitted from infected mother to her child Outbreaks affected mostly Latin American countries and The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention CDC currently lists the following countries as areas of active virus transmission Aruba Barbados Bolivia Bonaire Brazil Colombia Commonwealth of Puerto Rico US territory Costa Rica Cuba Curacao Dominica Dominican Republic Ecuador El Salvador French Guiana Guadeloupe Guatemala Guyana Haiti Honduras Jamaica Martinique Mexico Nicaragua Panama Paraguay Saint Martin Saint Vincent and the Grenadines Sint Maarten Suriname Trinidad and Tobago US Virgin Islands Venezuela American Samoa Fiji Kosrae Federated States of Micronesia Marshall Islands New Caledonia Samoa Tonga and Cape Verde The virus causes congenital birth defects especially microcephaly which is condition where the baby born with abnormally small head and undeveloped and damaged brain Zika has also been linked to Guillain Barre syndrome which is an autoimmune disease in which the body's immune system attacks part of the peripheral nervous system

The first symptoms of this disorder include varying degrees of weakness or tingling sensations in the legs In many instances the symmetrical weakness and abnormal sensations spread to the arms and upper body These symptoms can increase in intensity until certain muscles cannot be used at all and when severe the person is almost totally paralyzed a condition in which the immune system attacks the nerves Immunoglobulins Igs are key to B cell function because they serve as both an antigen receptor and a major secreted product The variable region binds antigen and is generated by random rearrangement of gene segments to give rise to numerous specificities Viral and host proteases cleave this polyprotein into seven non-structural NS1 NS2A NS2B NS3 NS4A NS4B and NS5 and three structural proteins capsid C premembrane membrane protein prM M and the envelope E Surface Ig is the major component of the B cell receptor complex which regulates B cell selection survival and activation Secreted Ig mediates antigen neutralization and opsonization with uptake by phagocytic cells complement activation and cellular activation or inhibition through engagement of receptors for the Fc region of Ig The antigenicity of proteins resides in different types of antigenic determinants known as continuous and discontinuous epitopes cryptotools isotopes and mimotopes All epitopes have fuzzy boundaries and can be identified only by their ability to bind to certain antibodies Antigenic cross reactivity is a common phenomenon because antibodies are always able to recognize a considerable number of related epitopes

This places severe limits to the specificity of antibodies Antigenicity which is the ability of an epitope to react with an antibody must be distinguished from its immunogenicity or ability to induce antibodies in a competent vertebrate host One of the indispensable and significant steps of vaccine development is the recognition of exceedingly competent B cell linear continuous or conformational discontinuous and Cytotoxic T lymphocyte CTL epitopes It has been reported that approximately 90 of B cell epitopes are discontinuous The target vaccine has been reported to elicit competent immune responses where T cells act as mediators With the help of immuno informatics approach we tried to make it possible to precisely narrow down potential B cell and T cell epitopes that can be characterized as effective vaccine candidates This research work is aimed to identify potential B cell and T cell epitopes with the help of insilico immunoinformatics approach To reach our goal we first tried to select the tool that can be the most reliable one and with good results we have used BepiPred Kolaskar Tongaonkar BepiPred ABCPred and BCPred to compare the results of Predicted epitopes and wetlab results of five antigens like Polio virus Plasmodium Falciparum Plasmodium Vivax Tuberculosis and Meningitis We found Kolaskar and Tongaonkar the best online prediction tool for B cell epitopes Sequence alignment across flaviviruses We have selected some results of BLAST search of ZIKV polyprotein against PDB sequence entries which gave us the highest scoring matches with 55 70 sequence identity These results showed that many of the proteins are similar to the same protein from Spondweni virus Except NS1 which was more similar to dengue virus 3 and glycoprotein E which was closest to the dengue virus 1 protein These results are in general accordance with whole sequence analyses The primary amino acid sequences of all ten Zika virus proteins were retrieved from the ZIKV polyprotein sequence GenBank ID AHZ13508 1 that is deposited in the National Center for Biotechnology Information NCBI database http www ncbi nlm nih gov protein

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