Staphylococcus aureus is one of the most notorious Gram-positive bacteria with a very high mortality rate. The WHO has listed S. aureus as one of the ESKAPE pathogens requiring urgent research and development efforts to fight against it. Yet there is a major layback in the advancement of effective vaccines against this multidrug-resistant pathogen. SdrD and SdrE proteins are attractive immunogen candidates as they are conserved among all the strains and contribute specifically to bacterial adherence to the host cells. Furthermore, these proteins are predicted to be highly antigenic and essential for pathogen survival. Therefore, in this study, using the immunoinformatics approach, a novel vaccine candidate was constructed using highly immunogenic conserved T-cell and B-cell epitopes along with specific linkers, adjuvants, and consequently modeled for docking with human Toll-like receptor 2. Additionally, physicochemical properties, secondary structure, disulphide engineering, and population coverage analysis were also analyzed for the vaccine. The constructed vaccine showed good results of worldwide population coverage and a promising immune response. For evaluation of the stability of the vaccine-TLR-2 docked complex, a molecular dynamics simulation was performed. The constructed vaccine was subjected to in silico immune simulations by C-ImmSim and Immune simulation significantly provided high levels of immunoglobulins, T-helper cells, T-cytotoxic cells, and INF-γ. Lastly, upon cloning, the vaccine protein was reverse transcribed into a DNA sequence and cloned into a pET28a (+) vector to ensure translational potency and microbial expression. The overall results of the study showed that the designed novel chimeric vaccine can simultaneously elicit humoral and cell-mediated immune responses and is a reliable construct for subsequent in vivo and in vitro studies against the pathogen.

COVID-19 is a contagious disease caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). To fight this pandemic, which has caused a massive death toll around the globe, researchers are putting efforts into developing an effective vaccine against the pathogen. As genome sequencing projects for several coronavirus strains have been completed, a detailed investigation of the functions of the proteins and their 3D structures has gained increasing attention. These high throughput data are a valuable resource for accelerating the emerging field of immuno-informatics, which is primarily aimed toward the identification of potential antigenic epitopes in viral proteins that can be targeted for the development of a vaccine construct eliciting a high immune response. Bioinformatics platforms and various computational tools and databases are also essential for the identification of promising vaccine targets making the best use of genomic resources, for further experimental validation. The present review focuses on the various stages of the vaccine development process and the vaccines available for COVID-19. Additionally, recent advances in genomic platforms and publicly available bioinformatics resources in coronavirus vaccine discovery together with related immunoinformatics databases and advances in technology are discussed.

Research efforts tried to expose students to security topics early in the undergraduate CS curriculum. However, such efforts are rarely adopted in practice and remain less effective when it comes to writing secure code. In our prior work [18], we identified key issues with the how students code and grouped them into six themes: (a) Knowledge of C, (b) Understanding compiler and OS messages, (c) Utilization of resources, (d) Knowledge of memory, (e) Awareness of unsafe functions, and (f) Understanding of security topics. In this work, we aim to understand students' knowledge about each theme and how that knowledge affects their secure coding practices. Thus, we propose a modified SOLO taxonomy for the latter five themes. We apply the taxonomy to the coding interview data of 21 students from two US R1 universities. Our results suggest that most students have limited knowledge of each theme. We also show that scoring low in these themes correlates with why students fail to write secure code and identify possible vulnerabilities.

Business Collaboration Platforms like Microsoft Teams and Slack enable teamwork by supporting text chatting and third-party resource integration. A user can access online file storage, make video calls, and manage a code repository, all from within the platform, thus making them a hub for sensitive communication and resources. The key enabler for these productivity features is a third-party application model. We contribute an experimental security analysis of this model and the third-party apps. Performing this analysis is challenging because commercial platforms and their apps are closed-source systems. Our analysis methodology is to systematically investigate different types of interactions possible between apps and users. We discover that the access control model in these systems violates two fundamental security principles: least privilege and complete mediation. These violations enable a malicious app to exploit the confidentiality and integrity of user messages and third-party resources connected to the platform. We construct proof-of-concept attacks that can: (1) eavesdrop on user messages without having permission to read those messages; (2) launch fake video calls; (3) automatically merge code into repositories without user approval or involvement. Finally, we provide an analysis of countermeasures that systems like Slack and Microsoft Teams can adopt today.