• Recent advances on the scale-up of alfalfa transgenic plants for the production of vaccine antigen for BVDV

MARIA SOL PEREZ-AGUIRREBURUALDE; CRISTINA GOMEZ; ANDREA PECORA; GOMEZ PABLO; FERNANDO ARDILA; DUS SANTOS MARIA JOSE; ALBANESSI GUILLERMO; ANDRES WIGDOROVITZ

BUENOS AIRES

Simposio; The 6th International Symposium on Molecular Breeding of Forage and Turf MBFT 2010.; 2010

Bovine viral diarrhea virus (BVDV) is a pestivirus belonging to the Flaviviridae family, it is an important cause of morbidity and economic losses of cattle with a worldwide distribution. Subunit vaccines provide the opportunity of developing safe vaccines. However, the challenge is to generate a protective immune response at a cost affordable for veterinary applications. Transgenic plants have been identified as a promising alternative for the commercial production of biomolecules. We have previously reported the production of transgenic alfalfa plants which express a truncated version of BVDV glycoprotein E2, without the transmembran domain (tE2) and a fusion protein between tE2 and a single chain antibody against MHCII (ScFv-tE2). Expression of recombinant proteins in these plants was evaluated by Western blot and ELISA. Moreover, the binding of ScFV-tE2 to the surface of peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) from different species was confirmed by flow cytometry (Ostachuck,2007). Antigen production was estimated to be approximately 1.5, and 1.7 ugr/gr of leaf for tE2 and ScFv-tE2, respectively. Recombinant vaccines formulated with those, inducing high titers of neutralizing antibodies in calves. In this work we demonstrate the feasibility of establishing a simple, economically and scalable process which allows the production of ScFvtE2 protein from alfalfa transgenic plants and we evaluate its immunogenicity and its protective efficacy in the natural host in a viral challenge experience