Edible Vaccines & Plantibodies Lecture Notes

Flashcards covering the concepts of innate/adaptive immunity, the production and limitations of edible vaccines, and the development and application of plantibodies.

Innate Immunity

The type of immunity consisting of physical barriers, chemical barriers, and cellular defenses.

Adaptive Immunity

A form of immunity that can be active or passive, and natural or artificial, such as through vaccination or the injection of antibodies.

Edible Vaccines

Transgenic plants or their products that contain agents triggering an immune response upon consumption.

Charles Arntzen

The individual who proposed the concept of edible vaccines in the 1990s.

HBsAg

The Hepatitis B virus surface antigen, which can be expressed in tobacco or lettuce for vaccine production.

Agrobacterium-mediated transformation

A method used to transform leaf disks for the expression of antigens like the hepatitis B virus surface antigen.

Stable transformation

A plant transformation method that produces a transgenic line and allows for easy storage and distribution, though it has slow development and potential outcrossing.

Transient transformation

A plant transformation method, such as agroinfiltration, characterized by high efficiency and increased protein expression, but it is difficult to scale up.

Open field cultivation

A cultivation method with lower costs and easy scale-up, but subject to strict guidelines and potential outcrossing.

Indoor system

A cultivation method like vertical hydroponics that provides higher quality and yield and minimizes contamination, but requires expensive infrastructure.

Plantibodies

Antibodies or their fragments produced by plants transformed with antibody-coding genes.

Affinity chromatography

The technique used for the purification of plantibodies during the post-transformation stage.

Neutralization

An application where antibodies block viral binding sites or coat bacteria to inactivate antigens.

Agglutination

The process of clumping microbes together, facilitated by antibodies.

PhR3

A tobacco-derived plantibody modified from nimotuzumab (hR3) used for cancer treatment.

ZMapp

A cocktail of 3 optimized plantibodies used for Ebola, which can reverse symptoms when administered up to 5 days post-infection in non-human primates.

ELISA

A method used for the evaluation of plantibodies after they have been purified.