Abstract:
The development of vaccines and diagnostic tools for SARS-CoV-2 heavily relies on identifying
conserved epitopes across various virus strains. BLASTp is a pivotal bioinformatics tool for
comparing protein sequences to unveil regions of similarity, aiding in understanding evolutionary
relationships and functional conservation. The current study used bioinformatics methods to
highlight the conserved epitopes on SARS-CoV-2 genomes isolated in Moi Teaching and Referral
Hospital. To achieve this objective, the genomes were divided into their constituent genes using
NCBI ORFfinder and translated to proteins using EXPASY. BlastP was then used to identify the
proteins. Meanwhile, epitopes from the Wuhan genome were downloaded from IEDB and a BlastP
analysis was done to identify matching epitopes. From the IEDB databank, 12285 Wuhan genome
epitopes were found and on conducting BlastP analysis, 5154 epitopes were isolated. These
epitopes were deemed conserved as they had not changed despite numerous mutations. The
identification and analysis of the conserved epitopes in the SARS-CoV-2 genome are crucial for
the development of effective vaccines and diagnostic tools. Further laboratory experiments are
however recommended to ascertain them to be conserved epitopes.
