High expression level of a foot and mouth disease virus epitope in tobacco transplastomic plants.
Chloroplast transformation has an extraordinary potential for antigen production in plants because of the capacity to accumulate high levels of recombinant proteins and increased biosafety due to maternal plastid inheritance in most crops. In this article, we evaluate tobacco chloroplasts transformation for the production of a highly immunogenic epitope containing amino acid residues 135-160 of the structural protein VP1 of the foot and mouth disease virus (FMDV). To increase the accumulation levels, the peptide was expressed as a fusion protein with the beta-glucuronidase reporter gene (uidA). The recombinant protein represented the 51% of the total soluble proteins in mature leaves, a level higher than those of the Rubisco large subunit, the most abundant protein in the leaf of a wild-type plant. Despite this high accumulation of heterologous protein, the transplastomic plants and wild-type tobacco were phenotypically indistinguishable. The FMDV epitope expressed in transplastomic plants was immunogenic in mice. These results show that transplastomic tobacco express efficiently the recombinant protein, and we conclude that this technology allows the production of large quantities of immunogenic proteins.
Lentz
Ezequiel Matías
EM
Laboratorio de Virología y Biotecnología Vegetal, INGEBI-UBA/CONICET, Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires, Vuelta de Obligado 2490, C1428ADN, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Segretin
María Eugenia
ME
Morgenfeld
Mauro Miguel
MM
Wirth
Sonia Alejandra
SA
Dus Santos
María José
MJ
Mozgovoj
Marina Valeria
MV
Wigdorovitz
Andrés
A
Bravo-Almonacid
Fernando Félix
FF
D000818:Animals; D036022:Capsid Proteins / Q000737:chemistry; D002736:Chloroplasts / Q000235:genetics* / Q000821:virology*; D000939:Epitopes / Q000276:immunology*; D005536:Foot-and-Mouth Disease / Q000821:virology; D029544:Foot-and-Mouth Disease Virus / Q000276:immunology*; D005822:Genetic Vectors / Q000235:genetics; D005966:Glucuronidase / Q000378:metabolism; D051379:Mice; D010641:Phenotype; D010940:Plant Proteins / Q000378:metabolism; D030821:Plants, Genetically Modified; D014026:Nicotiana / Q000235:genetics* / Q000821:virology*; D014170:Transformation, Genetic
D036022:Capsid Proteins; D000939:Epitopes; D010940:Plant Proteins; C442501:VP1 protein, Foot-and-mouth disease virus; D005966:Glucuronidase