The beginning of 2020 has seen the emergence of COVID-19 outbreak caused by a novel coronavirus, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). There is an imminent need to better understand this new virus and to develop ways to control its spread. In this study, we sought to gain insights for vaccine design against SARS-CoV-2 by considering the high genetic similarity between SARS-CoV-2 and SARS-CoV, which caused the outbreak in 2003, and leveraging existing immunological studies of SARS-CoV. By screening the experimentally-determined SARS-CoV-derived B cell and T cell epitopes in the immunogenic structural proteins of SARS-CoV, we identified a set of B cell and T cell epitopes derived from the spike (S) and nucleocapsid (N) proteins that map identically to SARS-CoV-2 proteins. As no mutation has been observed in these identified epitopes among the 120 available SARS-CoV-2 sequences (as of 21 February 2020), immune targeting of these epitopes may potentially offer protection against this novel virus. For the T cell epitopes, we performed a population coverage analysis of the associated MHC alleles and proposed a set of epitopes that is estimated to provide broad coverage globally, as well as in China. Our findings provide a screened set of epitopes that can help guide experimental efforts towards the development of vaccines against SARS-CoV-2.

The beginning of 2020 has seen the emergence of COVID-19 outbreak caused by a novel coronavirus, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). There is an imminent need to better understand this new virus and to develop ways to control its spread. In this study, we sought to gain insights for vaccine design against SARS-CoV-2 by considering the high genetic similarity between SARS-CoV-2 and SARS-CoV, which caused the outbreak in 2003, and leveraging existing immunological studies of SARS-CoV. By screening the experimentally-determined SARS-CoV-derived B cell and T cell epitopes in the immunogenic structural proteins of SARS-CoV, we identified a set of B cell and T cell epitopes derived from the spike (S) and nucleocapsid (N) proteins that map identically to SARS-CoV-2 proteins. As no mutation has been observed in these identified epitopes among the available SARS-CoV-2 sequences (as of 9 February 2020), immune targeting of these epitopes may potentially offer protection against this novel virus. For the T cell epitopes, we performed a population coverage analysis of the associated MHC alleles and proposed a set of epitopes that is estimated to provide broad coverage globally, as well as in China. Our findings provide a screened set of epitopes that can help guide experimental efforts towards the development of vaccines against SARS-CoV-2.

Beginning in May 2022, a novel cluster of monkeypox virus infections was detected in humans. This virus has spread rapidly to non-endemic countries, sparking global concern. Specific vaccines based on the vaccinia virus (VACV) have demonstrated high efficacy against monkeypox viruses in the past and are considered an important outbreak control measure. Viruses observed in the current outbreak carry distinct genetic variations that have the potential to affect vaccine-induced immune recognition. Here, by investigating genetic variation with respect to orthologous immunogenic vaccinia-virus proteins, we report data that anticipates immune responses induced by VACV-based vaccines, including the currently available MVA-BN and ACAM2000 vaccines, to remain highly cross-reactive against the newly observed monkeypox viruses.

Omicron, the most recent SARS-CoV-2 variant of concern (VOC), harbours multiple mutations in the spike protein that were not observed in previous VOCs. Initial studies suggest Omicron to substantially reduce the neutralizing capability of antibodies induced from vaccines and previous infection. However, its effect on T cell responses remains to be determined. Here, we assess the effect of Omicron mutations on known T cell epitopes and report data suggesting T cell responses to remain broadly robust against this new variant.

Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) is a modulation scheme that is widely used in wired and wireless communication systems. While OFDM is ideally suited to deal with frequency selective channels and AWGN, its performance may be dramatically impacted by the presence of impulse noise. In fact, very strong noise impulses in the time domain might result in the erasure of whole OFDM blocks of symbols at the receiver. Impulse noise can be mitigated by considering it as a sparse signal in time, and using recently developed algorithms for sparse signal reconstruction. We propose an algorithm that utilizes the guard band null subcarriers for the impulse noise estimation and cancellation. Instead of relying on \ell_1 minimization as done in some popular general-purpose compressive sensing schemes, the proposed method jointly exploits the specific structure of this problem and the available a priori information for sparse signal recovery. The computational complexity of the proposed algorithm is very competitive with respect to sparse signal reconstruction schemes based on \ell_1 minimization. The proposed method is compared with respect to other state-of-the-art methods in terms of achievable rates for an OFDM system with impulse noise and AWGN.