zahra zaer

Infectious diseases account for more than 45% of total deaths in developing countries. Vaccination is the most effective means to prevent infectious diseases but current vaccine production methods are complex and expensive in technology. Such conditions make it impossible for a large part of the developing and poor countries to have access to vaccination. New strategies for producing vaccine subunits include the use of different systems, such as fermentation, bacteria and mammalian cells. But these systems have limitations, including development costs, Transportation and cooling systems, making them impractical. For this purpose, plant - derived vaccines are considered as a new perspective on the production of vaccines. In this method, small fragments of DNA encoding the epitope or antigen to be linked to the coat protein gene of the plant viruses. Then the recombinant virus is used to infect the plants. In this way, a wide range of plants have been used to produce vaccines against diseases. In this article, we describe the methods of producing oral vaccine using transgenic plants and the advantages and disadvantages of this technology.

Because of limitations in antibody production against plant viruses, coat protein expression has been developed to prepare antigen for antibody production. In the recent research, Nucleocapsid gene of Tomato spotted wilt virus was amplified from a local strain in Iran. Cloned segment in TA vector (pTG19TSWV-N) was sub-cloned into pET32a as expression vector that digested by XhoI and BamHI. Then, pET32TSWV-N was transformed in two different strains of E. coli BL21(DE3) and BL21(DE3) pLysS by heat shock method. For protein expression, the transformed cells were induced by 1mM of IPTG in both strains. The protein was extracted four hours after induction and analyzed in SDS-PAGE. The SDS-PAGE result showed that a 48 kDa protein have been expressed that is expected based on additional tags from plasmid. The result revealed that nucleocapsid had been expressed in both strains whereas protein expression was little more in BL21(DE3) pLysS.