In the last 45 years, ebolaviruses have periodically caused epidemics in the African continent. In Dec 2019, approval of a recombinant vector-based EBOV vaccine, named Ervebo, came as an encouraging news; still, there is a long way to go in development of an accessible, global and pan-ebolavirus vaccine. In the current study, we expanded our previous in silico work which was conducted on ebolavirus glycoprotein and resulted in identification of three potentially immunogenic peptides (P1 - FKRTSFFLWVIILFQRTFSIPL, P2 - LANETTQALQLF and P3 - RATTELRTFSILNRKAIDF). An analysis to estimate the number of expected human leukocyte antigen (HLA) responders revealed that P1, P2 and P3 can potentially interact with 2540, 2150 and 2802 HLA alleles respectively. Further, these peptides were subject to in vitro analysis wherein human peripheral blood mononuclear cell (PBMC) proliferation and Interferon-gamma (IFN-γ) production by peptide stimulated cells was studied in ten healthy human blood samples with the help of 3-(4,5-dimethylthiazol-2-yl)-2,5-diphenyl tetrazolium bromide (MTT) assay and sandwich enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) respectively. P3 presented the best results, a significant (p<0.05) peptide induced cell proliferation and IFN-γ stimulation for eight and ten samples respectively, followed by P1 (five and six) and P2 (five and seven). The in silico and in vitro results obtained in this study indicate the immunogenic potential of these peptides and warrant exploration of effects on other cytokines as well as in vivo experimental validation.

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