Newcastle disease (ND) is one of the avian viruses that cause considerable economic losses worldwide. It is caused by a virus called Newcastle disease virus (NDV). Vaccines were available to reduce the devastating effect of ND. However, outbreaks of the disease were still found, even in vaccinated flocks. In order to generate a new multi-epitopic vaccine, this study aims to predict all conserved epitopes in the hemagglutinin neuraminidase (HN) of NDV isolated in Madagascar between 1992 and 2011; using bioinformatics tools. A total of 12 HN protein sequences were extracted from the National Center of Biotechnology Information (NCBI) database. To know the conserved regions, they were aligned in BIOEDIT 7.2.5. Then, immunoinformatics servers were used to predict the B and T-cells epitopes present in all sequences. The predicted T-cells epitopes are further docked with two chickens Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC) to find out their interaction capacity. As results, we identified 39 conserved epitopes including 17 B-cells epitopes and 22 Tcells epitopes. The majority of these epitopes are localized at the globular head of HN, forming 11 antigenic sites. Some of them are already identified by other researchers while some others are newly identified in this study. Nevertheless, all of these epitopes could be used in the design of a new vaccine against ND. Since this is a preliminary and in silico study, further study is needed to valorize these results.

Keywords : Newcastle disease; NDV; Hemagglutinin Neuraminidase; epitopes; Bioinformatics; immunoinformatics.