Plant-Based Vaccine Antigen Production.

The transient and stable expression of potentially therapeutic proteins in plants is a promising tool for the efficient production of vaccines and antibodies at low cost connected with a practically unlimited scale-up. To achieve these goals, two major challenges, inadequate production levels and non-scalable purification technologies, have to be overcome. Here we present and discuss protocols enabling to perform influenza vaccine production by transient expression in tobacco plants, to perform analytical experiments as Western blot, ELISA, and hemagglutination assays and to purify the antigens by classical affinity chromatography and scalable membrane-based Inverse Transition Cycling.