PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Xiaoxiao Jin
AU  - Ding Yan
AU  - Sun Shihui
AU  - Xinyi Wang
AU  - Zining Zhou
AU  - Xiaotao Liu
AU  - Miaomiao Li
AU  - Xian Chen
AU  - Anran Shen
AU  - Yandan Wu
AU  - Bicheng Liu
AU  - Jianqiong Zhang
AU  - Jian Li
AU  - Yi Yang
AU  - Haibo Qiu
AU  - Chuanlai Shen
AU  - Yuxian He
AU  - Guangyu Zhao
TI  - Screening of HLA-A restricted T cell epitopes of SARS-CoV-2 and induction of CD8<sup>+</sup> T cell responses in HLA-A transgenic mice
AID  - 10.1101/2021.04.01.438020
DP  - 2021 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2021.04.01.438020
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/04/01/2021.04.01.438020.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/04/01/2021.04.01.438020.full
AB  - While SARS-CoV-2-specific T cells have been characterized to play essential roles in host immune protection in COVID-19 patients, few researches focus on the functional validation of T cell epitopes and development of vaccines inducing specific T cell responses. In this study, 120 CD8+ T cell epitopes from E, M, N, S and RdRp proteins of SARS-CoV-2 were validated by on-silicon prediction, DC-peptide-PBL costimulation with healthy donors’ PBMCs and HLA-A molecule competitive binding experiments. Among them, 110, 15, 6, 14 and 12 epitopes were highly homologous with SARS-CoV, OC43, NL63, HKU1, and 229E, respectively. Thirty-one epitopes restricted by HLA-A2 molecule were used to generate peptide cocktail vaccines in combination with Poly(I:C), R848 or polylactic-co-glycolic acid nanoparticles, which elicited robust specific CD8+ T cell responses in wild-type and HLA-A2/DR1 transgenic mice. Seven of the 31 epitopes were found to be cross-presented by HLA-A2 and H-2K/Db molecules. These data have provided a library of SARS-CoV-2 CD8+ T cell epitopes which restricted by a series of high-frequency HLA-A allotypes and covered broad population in Asia, and initially confirmed the feasibility of human MHC class I molecule-restricted SARS-CoV2 epitope peptide cocktail vaccines, thus will facilitate the development of T cell epitope vaccines and specific cellular function detection kits.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.