Genetic modification, including plant breeding, has been widely used to improve crop yield and quality, as well as to increase disease resistance. Targeted genome engineering is expected to contribute significantly to future varietal improvement, and genome editing technologies using zinc finger nucleases (ZFNs), transcription activator-like effector nucleases (TALENs), and clustered regularly ...

The unpredictable nature of bio-terrorism compels us to develop medical countermeasures that will enable authorities to treat individuals exposed to agents such as anthrax. We report the feasibility of producing a protective, human-derived, monoclonal antibody directed against the protective antigen (PA) of Bacillus anthracis in plants. This was achieved by transient expression using agroinfilt...

Aphids are piercing-sucking insect pests and feed on phloem sap. During feeding, aphids inject a battery of salivary proteins into host plant. Some of these proteins function like effectors of microbial pathogens and influence the outcome of plant-aphid interactions. The pea aphid (Acyrthosiphon pisum) is the model aphid and encompasses multiple biotypes each specialized to one or a few legume ...

Background: The potential of plants, as a safe and eukaryotic system, is considered in the production of recombinant therapeutic human protein today; but the expression level of heterologous proteins is limited by the post-transcriptional gene silencing (PTGS) response in this new technology. The use of viral suppressors of gene silencing can prevent PTGS and improve transient expression level ...

In nature Citrus tristeza virus (CTV), genus Closterovirus, infects only the phloem cells of species of Citrus and related genera. Finding that the CTV T36 strain replicated in Nicotiana benthamiana (NB) protoplasts and produced normal virions allowed development of the first genetic system based on protoplast transfection with RNA transcribed from a full-genome cDNA clone, a laborious and unce...

BACKGROUND In recent years, different HIV antigens have been successfully expressed in plants by either stable transformation or transient expression systems. Among HIV proteins, Nef is considered a promising target for the formulation of a multi-component vaccine due to its implication in the first steps of viral infection. Attempts to express Nef as a single protein product (not fused to a st...