Proteomics

Molecular Pharming - Development of transient expression systems

In modern medicine recombinant proteins are used as vaccine and therapeutics. Many of these must be produced in eucaryotic cells to be biologically active. Plants have been suggested as a possible solution for the deficit in bioreactor availability. The last decade both transgenic plants and plant viral vectors have been increasingly used to produce a wide range of biomedical reagents. Plants offer an useful system for expressing therapeutic proteins. They provide several advantages such as lack of contamination with animal pathogen, eukaryotic protein modification machinery and economical production conditions. However, generating transgenic plants for stable protein expression is time consuming and may not guarantee the stability of transgenes during sexual crossing. Transient expression via a plant virus based vector is therefore an alternative method to express a therapeutic protein in short time and high amounts.
The section Proteomics is therefore developing transient expression systems with the help of viral vectors. The gene of interest is inserted into the viral clone and starts to be produced after infection of a host plant with the modified vector. With this approach production level of the recombinant protein up to 10% of total soluble protein can be achieved.
We are working with viral vectors derived from Tombus-, Nepo- and Tobamoviruses and produced already antibody fragments, antigens and immunotoxins via this approach. We try to improve stability of the vectors carrying different inserts and to optimise expression levels of the recombinant proteins.

Binding specificity of a plant-produced scFv (single chain Fv fragment) targeting Heliobacter pylori. The plant-produced scFv show a higher activity than the bacterial-produced one.

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