Immunoinformatics guided engineering of a Cysteine Proteases chimera protein from  Trichomonas foetus

Abstract Background Bovine Trichomonosis is one of the most notable sexually transmitted diseases of cattle resulting in severe reproductive failure. There were several incidents of zoonotic transmission reported in immune compromised individuals. However, till date there are no point-of-care diagnostics developed for onsite screening Trichomonas foetus infection in cattle. This current study was conducted to engineer a chimaera protein of Cysteine Proteases(most suitable target proteins of Trichomonas foetus) suitable for development of point of care diagnostics tools using Bioinformatics tools Results Based on earlier studies on Transcriptomics and proteomics of Trichomonas foetus, we have identified high level expressions of Cysteine proteases. Cysteine protease8 was the highly expressed protein followed by Cysteine protease13 and Cysteine protease16. Immune Epitope Data base tools for B-Cell epitope prediction identified immunogenic domains of about 60–90 amino acids long. The Chimaera of the above potential epitopes was found to exhibit a stable 3-D structure and was predicted to exhibit stable expression in Yeast. Conclusions Cysteine proteases chimaera protein is most suitable for recombinant protein expression in eukaryotic expression systems like Pichia pastoris. This recombinant protein would serve as potential antigen source for development of antibody detection tests such as Lateral flow assay and ELISA for detection of Bovine Trichomoniasis in cattle.