Successful oral prime-immunization with VP60 from rabbit haemorrhagic disease virus produced in transgenic plants using different fusion strategies.

Expression levels of vaccine antigens in transgenic plants have important consequences in their use as edible vaccines. The major structural protein VP60 from the rabbit haemorrhagic disease virus (RHDV) has been produced in transgenic plants using different strategies to compare its accumulation in plant tissues. The highest expressing plants were those presenting stable, complex, high-density structures formed by VP60, suggesting the importance of multisubunit structures for the stability of this protein in plant cells.

Measurement of antibody-membrane interactions by surface plasmon resonance.

Due to problems of immobilizing functional tumor antigens in their natural conformation on surfaces for immunoassays, it is often difficult to evaluate the binding of antibodies derived from phage display libraries depleted and selected by panning on cell lines and living tumor cells. Performing cell membrane based ELISA methods does not reveal any up front kinetic binding information and depends on the performance of secondary antibodies and substrates. To overcome these limitations, we developed a new method to visualize direct antibody-cell membrane interactions by surface plasmon resonance using the Biacore 3000 and on-line signal subtraction on antigen-negative cell membrane vesicles.