Expression of Complete Antibodies in Transgenic Plants

Plants are attractive vehicles for the expression of recombinant proteins as they are inexpensive and versatile systems, amenable to rapid and economic scale-up. Furthermore, transgenic plants can be established in resource-poor areas, where the demand for pharmaceutical proteins is greatest, but where the financial resources to pay for them are the most limited. Since the first report of a recombinant antibody expressed in transgenic plants, various antibody derivatives have been produced in different crop species. Human monoclonal antibodies, which posses a neutralizing capacity against HIV-1 have been successfully expressed in transgenic plants. The production of a full-length anti-HIV-1 antibody in tobacco seeds will be described in the following chapter. It starts with the construction of the binary vectors for Agrobacterium-mediated leaf disk transformation of tobacco and closes with the selection of progeny plants containing the transgenes for both immunoglobulin chain genes, and accumulating the assembled antibody. Protocols for the characterization of transgenic plants, multiplex PCR, Western blot analysis and ELISA techniques, are presented and explained.