Abstract
Emerging and re-emerging zoonotic diseases cause serious illness with billions of cases, and millions of deaths. The most effective way to restrict the spread of zoonotic viruses among humans and animals and prevent disease is vaccination. Recombinant proteins produced in plants offer an alternative approach for the development of safe, effective, inexpensive candidate vaccines. Current strategies are focused on the production of highly immunogenic structural proteins, which mimic the organizations of the native virion but lack the viral genetic material. These include chimeric viral peptides, subunit virus proteins, and virus-like particles (VLPs). The latter, with their ability to self-assemble and thus resemble the form of virus particles, are gaining traction among plant-based candidate vaccines against many infectious diseases. In this review, we summarized the main zoonotic diseases and followed the progress in using plant expression systems for the production of recombinant proteins and VLPs used in the development of plant-based vaccines against zoonotic viruses.
Highlights
Zoonoses are diseases transmitted from vertebrate animals to humans and are considered one of the most important threats to Public Health [1]
Oral vaccination with the plant-produced chimeric peptides, containing antigenic determinants from glycoprotein G and nucleoprotein N fused with the alfalfa mosaic virus coat protein (AlMV CP), improved weight gain in mice following a challenge with an attenuated virus strain [296]
Guerrero-Andrade et al showed that 100% of the chicken fed with transgenic maize expressing the F glycoprotein survived after a lethal challenge with Newcastle Disease Virus (NDV) [321]
Summary
Zoonoses are diseases transmitted from vertebrate animals to humans and are considered one of the most important threats to Public Health [1]. Transient expression in plants provides a higher yield of recombinant proteins within a shorter timeline than the stable modified plants and has been used successfully as a rapid response platform addressing emerging viral diseases such as Influenza and COVID 19. Stable transformation of plants takes longer, but once optimized, the transgenic system allows long-term and large-scale recombinant protein production. Various plant species such as tobacco, potato, cereals, lettuce, tomato, carrot, alfalfa, and oilseeds have been used for stable transformation by nuclear or chloroplast genome manipulation. The choice of technology to achieve a plant-based vaccine depends on the route of vaccine administration, the ability to achieve high levels of recombinant protein expression, and a low value of downstream processing. Chimeric plant-derived VLP vaccines are being developed against diseases such as cancer, allergies, and autoimmune diseases [63]
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