Chapter category: Biotechnology

Microalgal Vaccines

This chapter appears in the following book:

Transgenic Microalgae as Green
Cell Factories

Edited by: Rosa León, Aurora Gaván and Emilio Fernández
ISBN: 978-0-387-75531-1
» Get more information about this book at landesbioscience.com «

Chapter authors:
Surasak Siripornadulsil, Konrad Dabrowski and Richard Sayre

[+] view image

A variety of recombinant vaccines and vaccine delivery systems are currently under development as alternatives to vaccines produced in animals that are primarily administered by injections. These nonanimal alternatives do not transmit animal pathogens, are often rapid to develop, and can be produced on a large scale at low costs. Many of these new vaccine technologies are based on oral delivery systems and avoid the risks of disease transmission associated with the use of syringes for injectable vaccines. In addition, many of these novel systems have extended shelf life, often not requiring refrigeration and thus are applicable in developing countries or remote locations. Here we describe the development of microalgal-based immunization systems. Antigens expressed in the chloroplast or anchored to the surface of plasma membrane are shown to effectively immunize fish and rabbits. The effective oral delivery of antigens by microalgae provides a safe and inexpensive mechanism to immunize animals. The applications of microalgal vaccines are currently being investigated.

Surasak Siripornadulsil
Department of Microbiology, Khon Kaen University

Konrad Dabrowski
Department of Natural Resources, Ohio State University

Richard Sayre
Department of Plant Cellular and Molecular Biology, Ohio State University

» Access chapter for $19

Additional chapters from this book:

Tools and Techniques for Chloroplast Transformation of Chlamydomonas

Saul Purton

The chloroplast organelle of plant and algal cells contains its own genetic system with a genome of a hundred or so genes. Stable transformation of the chloroplast was first achieved in 1988, using th...

In the Grip of Algal Genomics

Arthur R. Grossman

Algae are dominant primary producers on the Earth and have a major impact on global \r\n productivity and biogeochemical cycling. There are still few algal genomes that have \r\n been completely chara...

Optimization of Recombinant Protein Expression in the Chloroplasts of Green Algae

Samuel P. Fletcher, Machiko Muto and Stephen P. Mayfield

Through advances in molecular and genetic techniques, protein expression in the chloroplasts of green algae has been optimized for high-level expression. Recombinant proteins expressed in algae have t...

Transformation of Cyanobacteria

Agustín Vioque

Cyanobacteria are a diverse and successful group of bacteria defined by their ability to carry out oxygenic photosynthesis. They occupy diverse ecological niches and are important primary producers in...

Hydrogen Fuel Production by Transgenic Microalgae

Anastasios Melis, Michael Seibert and Maria L. Ghirardi

This chapter summarizes the state-of-art in the field of green algal H2-production and examines physiological and genetic engineering approaches by which to improve the hydrogen metabolism characteris...

Influence of Codon Bias on the Expression of Foreign Genes in Microalgae

Markus Heitzer, Almut Eckert, Markus Fuhrmann and Christoph Griesbeck

The expression of functional proteins in heterologous hosts is a core technique of modern biotechnology. The transfer to a suitable expression system is not always achieved easily because of several r...

Phycoremediation of Heavy Metals Using Transgenic Microalgae

Sathish Rajamani, Surasak Siripornadulsil, Vanessa Falcao, Moacir Torres, Pio Colepicolo and Richard Sayre

Microalgae account for most of the biologically sequestered trace metals in aquatic environments. Their ability to adsorb and metabolize trace metals is associated with their large surface:volume rati...

Microalgal Vaccines

Surasak Siripornadulsil, Konrad Dabrowski and Richard Sayre

Molecular Biology and the Biotechnological Potential of Diatoms

Peter Kroth

Diatoms are unicellular photoautotrophic eukaryotes that play an important role in ecology by fixing large amounts of CO2 in the oceans. Because they evolved by secondary endocytobiosis—a process of u...

Nuclear Transformation of Eukaryotic Microalgae: Historical Overview, Achievements and Problems

Rosa León and Emilio Fernández

Transformation of microalgae is a first step in their use for biotechnological applications involving foreign protein production or molecular modifications of specific cell metabolic pathways. Since t...

Insertional Mutagenesis as a Tool to Study Genes/Functions in Chlamydomonas

Aurora Galván, David Gonzalez-Ballester, Emilio Fernandez and Emilio Fernández

The unicellular alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii has emerged during the last decades as a model system to understand gene functions, many of them shared by bacteria, fungi, plants, animals and humans. A...

Chapter category: Biotechnology

Microalgal Vaccines

Additional chapters from this book:

SIGN IN