In a breakthrough, scientists have used plants to produce a new vaccine against the polio virus, a finding which can pave the way for global eradication of the disease. The novel vaccine was produced with a method that uses virus-like particles (VLPs) -- non-pathogenic mimics of the polio virus which are grown in plants. Genes that carry information to produce VLPs are infiltrated into the plant tissues. The host plant then reproduces large quantities of them using its own protein expression mechanisms."This is an incredible collaboration involving plant science, animal virology and structural biology.
The question for us now is how to scale it up -- we don't want to stop at a lab technique," said a Professor from a UK-based independent research organisation. VLPs look like viruses but are non-infectious. They have been biologically engineered so they do not contain the nucleic acid…
