Post-weaning diarrhea (PWD) in piglets is a major problem in piggeries worldwide and results in severe economic losses. Infection with Enterotoxigenic Escherichia coli (ETEC) is the key culprit for the PWD disease. F4 fimbriae of ETEC are highly stable proteinaceous polymers, mainly composed of the major structural subunit FaeG, with a capacity to evoke mucosal immune responses, thus demonstrat...

The likelihood of gene transfer from transgenic plants to bacteria is dependent on gene number and the presence of homologous sequences. The large number of transgene copies in transplastomic (transgenes contained in the chloroplast genome) plant cells as well as the prokaryotic origin of the transgene, may thus significantly increase the likelihood of gene transfer to bacteria that colonize pl...

Tuberculosis (TB) caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis is one of the leading fatal infectious diseases. The development of TB vaccines has been recognized as a major public health priority by the World Health Organization. In this study, three candidate antigens, ESAT-6 (6 kDa early secretory antigenic target) and Mtb72F (a fusion polyprotein from two TB antigens, Mtb32 and Mtb39) fused with ch...

Transplastomic tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum) plants expressing b-glucosidase (Bgl-1) show modified development. They flower 1 month earlier with an increase in biomass (1.9-fold), height (1.5-fold), and leaf area (1.6-fold) than untransformed plants. Trichome density on the upper and lower leaf surfaces of BGL-1 plants increase by 10and 7-fold, respectively, harboring 5-fold more glandular tricho...

Plants display a remarkable diversity of thioredoxins (Trxs), reductases controlling the thiol redox status of proteins. The physiological function of many of them remains elusive, particularly for plastidial Trxs f and m, which are presumed based on biochemical data to regulate photosynthetic reactions and carbon metabolism. Recent reports revealed that Trxs f and m participate in vivo in the ...

Abstract The major problem associated with production of transgenic proteins in plant expression systems is the low level their accumulation. Transplastomic plants a transgene incorporated not nuclear but plastid genome (plastome) some cases ensure elevation yield desired protein dozens times and more. However, two problems arise this case: frequency integration transgenes into difficulties hom...

In this issue of Plant Physiology, Pal Maliga’s laboratory reported a major advance in plastid transformation. Stable manipulation of the plastid genome of flowering plants was first reported nearly 30 years ago (Svab et al., 1990). The approach was to select transplastomic plants using spectinomycin, which blocks translation by the prokaryotic-type 70S ribosomes found in plastids. Thus, in the...

The insertion of transgenes into the plastid genome (plastome) has proved to be an effective alternative to nuclear transformation for producing stable transformants expressing heterologous proteins. Recently, methodology, characteristics, and possible fields of application of plastome transformation have been extensively reviewed (Lössl and Waheed, 2011; Scotti et al., 2012). From these report...

The objective of this study was to evaluate the effect of insect larval feeding on the fate and genetic transformability of recombinant DNA from a transplastomic plant. Leaves of tobacco plants with an aadA antibiotic resistance gene inserted into their chloroplast genome were incubated with larvae of the tobacco hornworm Manduca sexta (Lepidoptera). The specifically designed Acinetobacter stra...