In recent years, the prevalence of viral infectious diseases such as novel coronavirus[27, 28], influenza virus, and African swine fever virus[29, 30] has caused serious negative impacts on human and animal health worldwide. PEDV is a member of the coronavirus, coronavirus infection is mediated by its outer membrane protein S, which is further cleaved into S1 and S2 subunits by endogenous and / or exogenous proteases[31]. The S1 subunit recognizes and binds to the corresponding host receptor, while the S2 subunit mediates membrane fusion between the virus and the host cell[32], S1 contains two independent regions, the N-terminal region (S1-NTD) and the C-terminal region (S1-CTD)[33]. The S1-NTD and S1-CTD of coronavirus play an important role in recognition and binding to cell receptors, and the latter is one of the important targets for the development of antiviral drugs for PEDV. However, since 2010, different types of PEDV variants have emerged in many countries, which has seriously hindered the development of the global pig industry[34–38]. In view of the fact that the PEDV vaccine currently on the market does not provide sufficient immune protection for pigs, there is an urgent need for effective prevention and treatment drugs to assist the vaccine in blocking PEDV infection.
As affinity ligands, peptides have the characteristics of small molecular weight, easy synthesis, no immunogenicity and no cytotoxicity. Therefore, the selection of the key domains of the target protein that can specifically bind to the peptide ligand is the primary task in the design and screening of peptide ligands. In order to quickly obtain the best peptide ligands with good specificity and high affinity, the most commonly used high-throughput screening methods mainly include phage display technology, mRNA display technology, DNA display technology, combinatorial chemistry technology and computer virtual screening technology[39]. In comparison, computer virtual screening technology has many incomparable advantages, such as simple and rapid operation, reducing the workload of peptide screening, shortening the development cycle, and improving the success rate of screening[15]. It is regarded as an improvement and development of traditional high-throughput screening technology, and has also been applied in many fields. Molecular docking technology is one of the commonly used methods of computer virtual screening. Therefore, this study is the first attempt to use molecular docking technology for virtual screening to design affinity peptides with strong antiviral activity against PEDV infection.
Nanoparticles not only have adjuvant properties, but also can improve the efficiency of drug or vaccine delivery[40]. Poly (lactic-co-glycolic acid) PLGA is a biodegradable functional polymer organic compound composed of synthetic lactic acid and glycolic acid monomers. At present, carboxyl-modified PLGA nanoparticles are the most commonly used microsphere carriers for coupling proteins[41], peptides[42, 43], vitamins[44] and other organic substances. However, due to its special chemical properties, peptides have poor stability, unstable biological activity and poor biocompatibility in vivo. The PLGA microsphere carrier can effectively improve these problems and also prolong the half-life of the drug. Related studies have also proved that it can effectively induce protective immune response [45, 46]and protect the encapsulated vaccine from protease degradation through mucosal and systemic pathways. Therefore, the use of PLGA microspheres as a carrier to package peptide drugs is a promising research direction.
In our study, a high-affinity peptide P6 targeting the PEDV S1-CTD region was obtained by molecular docking technology, and it was covalently coupled with PLGA nanoparticles containing carboxyl groups to obtain P6-PLGA nanoparticles. However, considering that the purpose of our experiment is to block the adsorption of virus, we finally used virus pretreatment, cell pretreatment and co-treatment to evaluate the ability of P6-PLGA nanoparticles to prevent PEDV infection in vitro. The results showed that the higher the concentration of peptide P6, the higher the coupling efficiency with PLGA. However, the CCK-8 cell survival rate test results showed that when the concentration of P6-PLGA nanoparticles exceeded 1000 µg/mL, the cell survival rate was only 85%. In addition, qRT-PCR, western blotting and IFA results showed that P6-PLGA nanoparticles could significantly block PEDV adsorption in vitro. The main reason is that PLGA nanoparticles with a size of about 120 nm have a large steric hindrance, which can effectively block the binding of PEDV to protein peptide receptor aminopeptidase N (APN), etc., thereby preventing the infection of porcine epidemic diarrhea virus. On the other hand, in our previous study, peptide P6 and 110766 designed to target the PEDV S1-CTD region could significantly inhibit PEDV infection. More importantly, PLGA nanoparticles can not only improve the bioavailability of peptide drugs and prolong their half-life, but also avoid the degradation of peptides by some enzymes after entering the animal body. At the same time, it can also achieve targeted drug delivery and reduce the non-targeted local effects of drugs. Therefore, our study revealed a screening strategy for designing antiviral peptides targeting the PEDV S1-CTD region, and determined that P6-PLGA nanoparticles can be used as a promising antiviral candidate drug, laying a solid foundation for subsequent animal experiments.