Background: Although the conventional vaccines have been instrumented in the incidence of many infectious diseases, the advances in genetic engineering and bioinformatics have provided the opportunity for developing improved and new vaccines.
Methods: Reverse vaccinology was pioneered by a group of researchers investigating development of a vaccine against serogroup B Neisseria meningitidis. Reverse vaccinology analyzes the entire genome of a pathogen with the aid of computational programs to identify potentially antigenic extracellular proteins.
Results: Using this method for Neisseria meningitidis genome analysis, 600 secretory or surface-exposed proteins were identified and, subsequently, 350 proteins were expressed and purified. Finally, seven proteins capable of activating the immune system against a range of strains were identified.
Conclusion: Improved computational techniques are now able to provide researchers with high-confidence predictions for complex biological characteristics. This will herald a move to computer-aided biotechnology in which time-consuming and expensive large-scale experimental approaches are progressively replaced by functional bioinformatic investigations.