In silico analysis of Chikungunya Viral Genome

This book attempts to provide an in silico analysis of Chikungunyavirus that causes Chikungunya infection. This work entails and discusses many obscure facts about the pathogen CHIKV, which could possibly reveal the enigma associated with Chikungunya infections. The study includes a genome wide comparative analysis of CHIKV viral strains of all thegenotypes to understand evolving nature, mutation trend and degree of conservation among CHIKV viral strains. The study also aimed to analyze recombination events in CHIKV viral strains and recombination hot spots along the CHIKV genome. Further, the thesis analyzes epitopic peptides in CHIKV antigenic proteins and proposes druggable target peptides for developing effective vaccines for the disease. This computational epitopic studies and identification of druggable target peptides can mitigate the cost and time overruns of the trial and error based traditional drug design methods. Moreover, these studies could pave way for designing effectivedisease diagnostic approaches. Furthermore this work presents an in silicogenotyping tool for Chikungunya virus to characterize the genotype of 2unknown CHIKV strains using soft computing approaches.