Predicted binding affinity of candidate HDV epitope: a bioinformatics study.

Hepatitis D virus (HDV) is an RNA virus that can cause hepatitis. Development and approval of new vaccines are the hope for control of the possible emerging pandemic of this infection. Recently, the possible epitope as 174 to 195 of HDAg was mentioned. Here, the author reports the preliminary data from the computational analysis to find binding affinity of the candidate HDV epitope using new bioinformatics technique. For LHDAg, the binding affinity for A0203, A0301, A1101, A6801 and DRB0101 are acceptable. For S-HDAg, the binding affinity for A0203, A0301, A1101, A6801 and DRB6802 are acceptable. The binding affinity for A0203 is the most for both L-HDAg and S-HDAg.