Provided herein is a computational method for designing a PCP-consensus protein for a family of related proteins. The method uses a consensus alignment of a protein domain common to all the related proteins, which may or may not be substantially biased, from which an average value of p, e.g., 5, physicochemical properties are calculated for each amino acid in the alignment. The PCP-consensus protein has a sequence derived from an alignment of protein domains from a family of related proteins, said sequence containing one or more motifs common to all of the proteins. Also provided are the PCP-consensus proteins, kits comprising the same, datasets of aligned consensus sequences used to derive the PCP-consensus proteins and methods of eliciting an immune response, diagnosing or treating an infectious disease using the same.
