With the ever growing population, advancements in edible vaccines and related technologies have seen a rise in popularity. Antigenic peptides incorporated into an edible part of a plant can be administered raw as a vaccine. While conventional vaccines have improved the quality of life by drastically reducing the onset of diseases, edible vaccines are able to perform the same with greater accessibility and at an affordable price. Low cost of production, ease of storage, transportation and administration are some of the many reasons behind the push for the development of edible vaccines. This article aims at giving an overview of the different plant systems used to produce vaccines in various experiments, as well as the merits and demerits of using that particular expression system. Further, the article elaborates on the problems faced in the production of edible vaccines and the measures adopted to surpass them. The major obstacle in the process is attaining a sufficiently large concentration of foreign antigen in the plant system. The article discusses various plant expression systems like banana, rice, alfalfa, mushroom, potato, tomato, pea, tobacco, and maize. When these were reviewed, it was found that the inability to produce the desired antigen concentration was one of the primary reasons why edible vaccines sometimes fail to generate the desired level of immune response in the recipient. We conclude with a promising solution to the problem by incorporating nano-technological advancements to the already existing protocols for edible vaccine development.

Background We sought to determine the prevalence of germline pathogenic variants (gPVs) in unselected patients with endometrial cancer (EC), define biallelic gPVs within tumors, and describe their associations with clinicopathologic features. Methods Germline assessment of ≥ 76 cancer predisposition genes was performed in patients with EC undergoing clinical tumor-normal MSK-IMPACT sequencing from 1/1/15-6/30/21. In patients with gPVs, biallelic alterations in ECs were identified through analysis of loss of heterozygosity and somatic PVs. Clinicopathologic variables were compared using non-parametric tests. Results Of 1625 patients with EC, 216 (13%) had gPVs, and 15 patients had 2 gPVs. There were 231 gPVs in 35 genes (75 [32%] high-penetrance, 39 [17%] moderate-penetrance, and 117 [51%] low/recessive/uncertain-penetrance). Compared to those without gPVs, patients with gPVs were younger (P=.002), more often White (P=.009), less obese (P=.025) and had differences in distribution of tumor histology (P=.017) and molecular subtype (P<.001). Among 231 gPVs, 74 (32%) exhibited biallelic inactivation within tumors. For high-penetrance gPVs, 63% (47/75) of ECs had biallelic alterations, primarily affecting mismatch repair (MMR) and homologous recombination (HR) genes, including BRCA1/2, RAD51D, and PALB2. Biallelic inactivation varied across molecular subtypes with highest rates in microsatellite instability-high (MSI-H) or copy-number (CN)-high subtypes [3/12 (25%) POLE, 30/77 (39%) MSI-H, 27/60 (45%) CN-H, 9/57 (16%) CN-L, P<.001]. Conclusions Thirteen percent of unselected patients with EC had gPVs, with 63% of gPVs in high-penetrance genes (MMR and HR) exhibiting biallelic inactivation, potentially driving cancer development. This supports germline assessment in EC given implications for treatment and cancer prevention.

Mitochondria are energy-producing organelles within the cytoplasm of a cell and are often referred to as the powerhouse of the cell. Independent of the nuclear DNA that a child inherits from both parents, the child also inherits mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) exclusively from the mother, with rare exceptions. Mitochondrial DNA is circular and contains 37 genes associated with transfer RNA (tRNA), ribosomal RNA synthesis, and enzymes involved in oxidative phosphorylation (Reznichenko et al., 2016). Mitochondrial disorders may be caused by pathogenic variants in mtDNA or pathogenic variants in nuclear genes that affect mitochondrial function.