Immunoinformatics Based Development of A Multi‐epitope Vaccine Against African Swine Fever Virus

African swine fever virus (ASFV) causes African swine fever which is a highly fatal haemorrhagic viral disease of domestic swine with detrimental effect on the development of swine industries in affected countries. Effective management and control of the disease is limited by lack of a protective vaccine against the virus. A cost‐effective avenue to develop effective vaccines is by harnessing immunoinformatic tools to generate highly conserved CD4+ and CD8+ epitopes which can be combined to construct a multi‐epitope broad spectrum subunit vaccine. Therefore, in this study, computational/immunoinformatic tools were used to generate CD4+ and CD8+ epitopes of the ASFV major coat protein p72, CD2 homologue CD2v and C‐type lectin like proteins which are good vaccine candidates capable of inducing protective immunity against the virus. The epitopes were computationally harnessed to develop a multi‐epitope subunit vaccine against the virus. The multi‐epitope vaccine quality was validated in silico and its stability was confirmed using molecular dynamic simulation. Molecular docking was employed to assess the interaction between the vaccine and Toll‐like receptors and the Swine Leukocyte Antigen. In silico cloning and codon optimization were used to bolstered the efficient expression of the vaccine in an E. coli expression system. The efficacy of the vaccine to provoke an effective immune response was assessed using in silico immune simulation. All these computational approaches revealed that the designed vaccine is structurally stable and capable of inducing both humoral cell mediated immune response against the ASFV.