Expression of Hemagglutinin-Neuraminidase glycoprotein of Newcastle Disease Virus in agroinfiltrated Nicotiana benthamiana plants.

GÓMEZ, E.; CHIMENO ZOTH, S.; ASURMENDI, S.; VÁZQUEZ ROVERE, C.; BERINSTEIN, A.

JOURNAL OF BIOTECHNOLOGY

ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV

Año: 2009 vol. 144 p. 337 - 340

0168-1656

The worldwide need for producing safer and less expensive vaccines with minor manufacture andprocessing requirements, together with the advances made through biotechnology, has promoted thedevelopment of efficient alternative tools to conventional vaccines. One of these is the use of plants orplant cell culture as production platforms of vaccine antigens with potential use as immunogens. Wehave already described the use of transgenic potato plants as immunogens against Newcastle DiseaseVirus (NDV), although the amount of the recombinant antigen recovered was low. The main objective ofthe work presented here was to enhance the expression of the HN glycoprotein of NDV through a proteintargeting strategy and a promoter change. We have cloned the HN coding region under the regulation ofthe rubisco small subunit promoter in 5 different versions in a subcellular localization strategy, and wehave established that the construct harboring the complete HN gene with its own signal peptide, fused toKDEL retention peptide, rendered the best expressed/accumulated HN protein level whether a transientor a stable transformation assay was performed. We conclude that agroinfiltration results in a simpleand useful tool for selecting suitable genetic constructions to be used in stable plant transformation and,moreover, it could be used as a method to produce immunogens for vaccine developments.