Viroj Wiwanitkit
Department of Clinical Laboratory Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, Wiwanitkit House, Bangkok, Thailand

Received: March 15, 2007     Revised: June 10, 2007     Accepted: June 18, 2007

Corresponding author: Dr. Viroj Wiwanitkit, Wiwanitkit House, 38/167, Bangkhae Soi Yimprayoon, Bangkhae, Bangkok, Thailand 10160. E-mail: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Background and Purpose: Malarial merozoite surface protein 1 (MSP-1) may have value as a protective immunogen in novel vaccines against malaria. This study was performed to find potential T-cell epitopes for MSP-1 of Plasmodium vivax.

Methods: Computation analysis of available MSP-1 of the P. vivax malaria sequence was performed to find potential T-cell epitopes using MHCPred version 2.0. Alleles for binding affinity prediction were selected and the peptides with the best binding affinities for each allele were investigated.

Results: The peptides with the best predicted binding affinities were human leukocyte antigen (HLA)-DRB0101, HLA-A0203, and HLA-DRB0701, which showed significantly lower 50% inhibitory concentration values than the other alleles.

Conclusion: These data are useful for further vaccine development because the promiscuous peptide binders enable reduction of the number of predicted epitopes without compromising the population coverage required for vaccine design.

Key words: Alleles; Epitopes; Malaria; Merozoite surface protein 1

J Microbiol Immunol Infect. 2009;42:19-21.