Rapid, high-level production of hepatitis B core antigen in plant leaf and its immunogenicity in mice

Plant-expressed Hepatitis B core antigen virus-like particles: Characterization and investigation of their stability in simulated and pig gastro-intestinal fluids

“…These results are in accordance with previous studies on HBcAg (Birnbaum and Nassal, 1990;Broos et al, 2007;Huang et al, 2006). Furthermore, when a sample containing the dialysed 30 and 40% w/v sucrose gradient fractions was examined by native agarose gel (Figure 1.…”

“…In the HBcAg-rich lanes, it is also possible to notice a persistent 40 kDa band. The band was also observed by others and corresponds to HBcAg dimers, which are resistant to denaturation (Huang et al, 2006;Mechtcheriakova et al, 2006). Even larger size HBcAg multimeric structures have been detected in denaturing gel electrophoresis (Broos et al, 2007).…”

“…This internal nucleocapsid results from the self-assembly of the nucleocapsid protein, a 21 kDa protein called Hepatitis B core antigen (HBcAg): 180 or 240 HBcAg monomers are arranged into 30 or 34 nm icosahedral particles (Birnbaum and Nassal, 1990;Crowther et al, 1994). HBcAg VLPs can be produced as a recombinant protein in a variety of hosts, including plants (Huang et al, 2006;Mechtcheriakova et al, 2006;Sainsbury and Lomonossoff, 2008). HBcAg has been shown to induce potent B and T cell responses (Milich et al, 1997(Milich et al, , 1987.…”

A Simple Method for Transient Expression of Reporter Gene in Brinjal Leaves through Agroinfiltration

“…This method has been optimized in different crop species and has been successfully explored for diverse objectives, which include the study of gene silencing (Schöb et al, 1997;Johansen and Carrington, 2001), plant promoter analysis (Yang et al, 2000), plant R and Avr gene interactions (Van der Hoorn et al, 2000), recombinant protein production (Joh et al, 2005), rapid production of therapeutic agents in plant systems (Huang et al, 2006;Chen et al, 2013), gene function analysis (Hoffmann et al, 2006;Santos-Rosa et al, 2008), analysis of transcription factors (Berger et al, 2007), plant-based synthetic biology applications (Sainsbury and Lomonossoff, 2014) and many more.…”

Alternative approaches to vaccine delivery

“…24 MagnICON, a TMV-based viral provector system developed by Icon genetics, 25 has shown great promise in rapid production of large quantities of various recombinant proteins. [26][27][28][29][30] Using this system, we have achieved high yield (5-10% TSP) production of PyMSP4/5, which was highly stable at ambient temperature after freeze-drying and was immunogenic following oral administration in mice. 31 Since Mason et al reported the successful expression of HBsAg in transgenic tobacco, which demonstrated the promise of using transgenic plants as low-cost vaccine production systems, 32 the concept of plant-produced vaccine has changed from "edible vaccines" to "heat-stable oral vaccines" or low-cost injectable vaccines.…”