Reference #: 00126
The University of South Carolina is offering licensing opportunities for this technology
Invention Description:
The subject invention is a method of inactivating the plants natural immune response in order to get desired levels of gene expression. The invention also consists of the identification of a plant virus genomic sequence, which can boost the replication, and accumulation of a broad range of other plant viruses.
Potential Applications:
The primary potential application for this technology is in the field of therapeutic protein production (antibodies, vaccines and other proteins). This discovery is also useful for technologies that use plant viruses as vectors to express foreign genes, because it may increase the accumulation of the foreign gene product by enhancing virus replication and/or allowing the virus vector to move more effeciently and stably accumulate throughout plant.
Advantages and Benefits:
This technique enables the researcher to circumvent the plants’ immune system in order to produce gene products with increased speed and efficiency. Crop plants can be engineered to be more tolerant to stresses such as extreme temperatures or salt (which would increase their geographic distribution), insects, and pathogens. They may be engineered also to have increased iron accumulation for example.
Problem:
Genes are introduced into plants in order to produce desired products. Scientists exploit the plants’ natural molecular machinery in order to produce a gene product, which is usually a protein. Using modern techniques, crop plants can be produced which generate their own insecticide for example or plants can be produced which generate antibodies later isolated from the plants and used in vaccines. Because DNA is a universal molecule (present in all living things), the genes that are introduced into plants can be native to the plant or can be from other species, including plant, viral, bacterial, or animal species. However, introducing genes into a plant is typically unsuccessful because of the plants’ cosuppression response, which is a natural immune response. The plant effectively shuts down production of the introduced gene’s product through a molecular targeting system. This inactivation of gene expression (stopping the production of specific gene products) is a problem in cases where high levels of expression of an introduced gene or over expression of a plant’s native gene(s) are desirable.