vaccine Fungal infections pose a serious threat to human health. Particularly immunocompromised patients are highly susceptible to life-threatening infections by opportunistic fungi, most often by Candida or Aspergillus species.The virulence factor contributing significantly in pathogenicity of fungal species is adhesion to host cells and tissues mediated by certain cell surface proteins called adhesins. Therefore targeting the adhesins in vaccine development can help to efficiently combat fungal infections. We have hence developed a an Integrated Immunoinformatics portal for fungal pathogens named FungalRV to aid fungal adhesin vaccine development process.



    Salient Features of FungalRV

  • FungalRV houses list of known fungal vaccines from extensive literature survey.
  • FungalRV provides an adhesin predictor software tool to predict human pathogenic fungal adhesins and adhesin-like proteins.
  • FungalRV also provides a detailed analysis of predicted adhesins and adhesin-like proteins from eight human pathogenic fungal species namely Candida albicans, Candida glabrata, Aspergillus fumigatus, Coccidioides immitis, Coccidioides posadasii, Blastomyces dermatitidis, Paracoccidioides brasiliensis and Histoplasma capsulatum selected by run of their proteomes on FungalRV adhesin predictor. The analysis includes various computational approaches to identify the number of paralogs, orthologs, number of transmembrane helices, signal peptides, beta wraps and topology of the protein. It also provides information about conserved domains present in the predicted adhesins and blastp results reflecting similarity to host proteins.
  • FungalRV also provides detailed epitope information for all the predicted adhesins. It contains the linear B cell epitope data obtained from ABCpred and Bcepred servers and discontinuous B cell epitope data from Discotope and BEpro servers. The T cell epitope data obtained from Propred, IEDB T Cell epitope prediction tools, NetMHC and Bimas servers are also present.
  • The Allergen data regarding the chances of the protein being an allergen obtained from AlgPred and Allermatch are also incorporated.
  • These data are important from reverse vaccinology view and will help the researchers in fungal adhesin vaccine candidate identification process

    • Citation
    Chaudhuri R, Alam Ansari F, Raghunandanan MV, Ramachandran S: FungalRV: Adhesin prediction and immunoinformatics portal for human fungal pathogens,BMC Genomics. 2011 Apr 15;12(1):192.