Plants That Can be Used as Plant-Based Edible Vaccines; Current Situation and Recent Developments

Abstract

Among the purposes of genetic engineering technology applications in plants, improving product quality, increasing resistance to harmful organisms and improving agronomic properties, the most important one is the production of drugs, hormones and vaccines for humans and animals (for example, the use of potatoes in cholera vaccines). Today, the use of plants as bioreactors to obtain recombinant proteins from plants has been further developed and accelerated thanks to the developments in plant genetics, molecular biology and biotechnology. Appearing as a concept about a decade ago, plant bioreactors are genetically modified plants whose genomes have been manipulated to incorporate and express gene sequences of a number of useful proteins from different biological sources. Plant-derived bioreactor systems offer significant advantages over techniques used for other biological-based protein production. Easy and inexpensive production from plant tissues, providing appropriate post-translational modifications for the production of recombinant viral and bacterial antigens, and showing similar biological activity to recombinant vaccines obtained in microorganisms are important reasons that encourage the use of plant tissues in vaccine production. Edible vaccines, which create an immune response in the body against a foreign pathogen that causes disease, have a working mechanism that serves as both a nutritive and a vaccine that we consume in our daily lives. In the development of edible vaccines, the gene responsible for the production of the part of the foreign pathogen that causes the disease, that is, the antigen, which provides the immune response in the body, is transferred to the plants. With this technique, antigen production is carried out in plants. For example, thanks to today's advancing technology, enough hepatitis B antigens to vaccinate all of the world's approximately 133 million live births each year can be grown on a field of approximately two hundred hectares. In addition to these, edible vaccine technology also makes edible vaccines an interesting concept as secondgeneration vaccines, as they allow several antigens to approach M (microcoat) cells at the same time, by offering multicomponent vaccine proteins that are possible by crossing two plant lines.