title: Conserved antigenic sites between MERS-CoV and Bat-coronavirus are revealed through sequence analysis.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  MERS-CoV is a newly emerged human coronavirus reported closely related with HKU4 and HKU5 Bat coronaviruses. Bat and MERS corona-viruses are structurally related. Therefore, it is of interest to estimate the degree of conserved antigenic sites among them. It is of importance to elucidate the shared antigenic-sites and extent of conservation between them to understand the evolutionary dynamics of MERS-CoV.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Multiple sequence alignment of the spike (S), membrane (M), enveloped (E) and nucleocapsid (N) proteins was employed to identify the sequence conservation among MERS and Bat (HKU4, HKU5) coronaviruses. We used various in silico tools to predict the conserved antigenic sites. We found that MERS-CoV shared 30 % of its S protein antigenic sites with HKU4 and 70 % with HKU5 bat-CoV. Whereas 100 % of its E, M and N protein's antigenic sites are found to be conserved with those in HKU4 and HKU5.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  This sharing suggests that in case of pathogenicity MERS-CoV is more closely related to HKU5 bat-CoV than HKU4 bat-CoV. The conserved epitopes indicates their evolutionary relationship and ancestry of pathogenicity.
authors.affiliation: Research and Development Department, Incepta Vaccine Ltd., Zirabo, Savar, Dhaka 1341 Bangladesh.
authors.forename: Refat
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Sharmin
authors.affiliation: Department of Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology, University of Dhaka, Science Complex Building, Dhaka, 1000 Bangladesh.
authors.forename: Abul B M M K
authors.initials: AB
authors.lastname: Islam
keywords: Epitope; HKU4; HKU5; MERS-CoV