Analysis of the antigenic epitopes on the S proteins
In order to study the antigenic variation of PEDV strains, all of the ninety-one S protein sequences were used for a sequence alignment. Twenty-eight representative sequences were selected and compared with Chinese PEDV vaccine strain (attenuated CV777 and AJ1102). A focus was on the neutralizing epitope regions including S1A, COE domain, SS2, SS6, 2C10, and the linear B-cell epitope SE16 (Peng et al., 2020; Q. Zhang et al., 2017).