In silico identification of plasmodium falciparum merozoite membrane proteins: a study of malaria vaccinology / Siti Badariah Baharin

Malaria is a serious infectious disease that has contributes to high rate of mortality throughout the world. It is spread by Anopheles mosquitoes, which have been prior infected by Plasmodium parasites such as Plasmodium falciparum, Plasmodium vivax, Plasmodium ovale, and Plasmodium malariae. The current scenarios of malaria are that the antimalarial drugs cannot provide sufficient treatment, and the vaccines available also could not give full protection. Therefore, this study is aim at using in silica software to analyze protein sequence whether it could be a candidate to produce an effective vaccine. The analysis of the Pf7 protein sequence of Plasmodium falciparum shows that this protein consists of 264 amino acids, with grand average ofhydropathicity (ORA VY) value of -0.824. The negative value indicates that this protein is hydrophilic. This protein is located extracellularly and secondary structure prediction shows that it consists of 46.8% coil, 23.8% sheet, 19.0% turns, and 16.9% helix. For antigen epitope prediction, the result shows that subsequence "FFIFVTFNf' has high probability as promiscuous binder. As the conclusion, results obtained from all of the analyses conducted for this Pf7 protein can act as preliminary information in designing actual candidate vaccine in the future.