Rotavirus A (RVA) remains one of the most widespread causes of diarrheal disease and mortality in piglets despite decades of research and efforts to boost lactogenic immunity for passive protection. Genetic changes at B cell epitopes (BCEs) may be driving failure of lactogenic immunity, which relies on production of IgA antibodies to passively neutralize RVA within the piglet gut, yet little research has mapped epitopes to swine-specific strains of RVA. Here we describe a bioinformatic approach to predict BCEs on the VP7 outer capsid protein using sequence data alone. We first validated the approach using a previously published dataset of VP7-specific cross-neutralization titers, and found that amino acid changes at predicted BCEs on the VP7 protein allowed for accurate recapitulation of antigenic relationships among the strains. Applying the approach to a dataset of swine RVA sequences identified 9 of the 11 known BCEs previously mapped to swine strains, indicating that epitope prediction can identify sites that are known to drive neutralization escape in vitro. Additional genotype-specific BCEs were also predicted that may be the cause of antigenic differences among strains of RVA on farms and should be targeted for further confirmatory work. The results of this work lay the groundwork for high throughput, immunologically-relevant analysis of swine RVA sequence data, and provide potential sites that can be targeted with vaccines to reduce piglet mortality and support farm health.

轮状病毒A（RVA）仍然是仔猪腹泻病和死亡率最广泛的原因之一，尽管数十年来进行了研究并努力提高用于被动保护的乳原性免疫力。B细胞表位（BCEs）的遗传变化可能是促乳汁免疫力失败的动力，这依赖于IgA抗体的产生来被动​​中和仔猪肠道内的RVA，但很少有研究将表位定位于猪特异性RVA株。在这里，我们描述了一种仅使用序列数据即可预测VP7外衣壳蛋白上BCE的生物信息学方法。我们首先使用以前发布的VP7特异性交叉中和效价数据集验证了该方法，并发现VP7蛋白上预测的BCE处的氨基酸变化允许准确重现菌株之间的抗原关系。体外。还预测了其他基因型特异性BCE，可能是农场RVA株之间抗原差异的原因，应作为进一步确认工作的目标。这项工作的结果为猪RVA序列数据的高通量，免疫学相关分析奠定了基础，并提供了可用于疫苗靶向的潜在位点，以降低仔猪死亡率并支持农场健康。