The green revolution: plants as heterologous expression vectors

Agrobacterium tumefaciens mediated gene transfer into the plant genome laid the groundwork for new procedures aimed at crop improvement, including res istance to pathogens, increased product yield, modified oil content, and re sistance to environmental stress conditions. New developments in molecular plant virology have led to the generation of plant-based systems for transi ent expression of foreign sequences using plant virus vectors. In the last decade both transgenic plants and plant virus vectors have been used increa singly to produce a wide range of biomedical reagents, including vaccine an tigens, in a safe and economically feasible manner. These new plant-based t echnologies have enormous potential for a variety of applications, includin g the oral delivery of vaccine antigens. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.