Systemic production of foreign peptides on the particle surface of tobacco mosaic virus

Replication of tobamovirus RNA

“…The resulting virus multiplies systemically in host plants, and the wild-type CP and fusion protein co-assemble into virus particles. 94) Using this vector, the angiotensin I-converting enzyme inhibitor peptide, 94) epitopes from the influenza virus hemagglutinin and human immunodeficiency virus type I envelope protein, 95) and the malarial epitope, 90) have been displayed successfully on the surfaces of recombinant tobamovirus particles. In addition to the production of foreign proteins or peptides, pioneering work has been performed with tobamovirus vectors with respect to demonstrating virus-induced gene silencing 96) and to engineering plant metabolic pathways for the production of novel compounds via epigenetic expression of foreign genes.…”

Identification of Immunogenic Hot Spots within Plum Pox Potyvirus Capsid Protein for Efficient Antigen Presentation

“…These carrier proteins have the potential to assemble and form recombinant virus particles displaying the desired epitopes on their surfaces. Both filamentous and icosahedral plant viruses have been successfully developed as epitope presentation systems (13,14,20,21,30,38,40,42,43) and in some cases as an alternative to previous tissue culture-derived vaccines (9,25).…”

Assembly and movement of a plant virus carrying a green fluorescent protein overcoat.

“…This limitation has been overcome, for peptides of up to 21 amino acids, by exploiting the TMV 130-kDa protein read-through motif that determines the suppression of an amber termination codon in the TMV polymerase reading frame (16). Insertion of a suppressible stop codon between the end of the CP open reading frame and a carboxyl-terminal extension allows the generation of a mixed pool of free and fused CP subunits that can assemble into virions comprising heterologous subunits (15,17). The limited size of peptides that can be fused to the CPs of TMV and cowpea mosaic virus, while retaining the ability to assemble into virions, has restricted these systems to expression of peptide immunogens (11,15,17) and a peptide hormone (10).…”