plant-made-vaccines
Plant-made vaccines (also called plant-based or edible vaccines) involve engineering plants to produce antigenic proteins that can trigger an immune response when administered or consumed. This approach leverages plants as low-cost, scalable bioreactors, using their cellular machinery to correctly fold and assemble complex vaccine antigens. For plant scientists, this field sits at the intersection of molecular farming, genetic transformation, and plant biotechnology, offering insights into how foreign proteins are expressed, processed, and stabilized within plant tissues.
PubMed · 2026-04-01
Scientists engineered tobacco plants to produce protein nanoparticles carrying Salmonella antigens — a step toward plant-made vaccines that could protect poultry flocks from the bacteria responsible for most Salmonella food poisoning in humans.
Five different versions of the Salmonella-antigen fusion protein were successfully produced in tobacco plant leaves, targeting either chloroplasts or the cell cytosol.
Chloroplast-targeted versions accumulated at levels exceeding 0.7 mg per gram of fresh leaf tissue — the highest yield achieved in the study.
The fusion proteins self-assembled into mosaic nanoparticles, meaning the plant-produced components can spontaneously form the multi-antigen structures needed for vaccine activity.
