Background: Newcastle disease is an important avian infectious disease that brings about vast economic damage for poultry industry. Transgenic plants represent a cost-effective systemfor the production of therapeutic proteins and are widely used for the production of poultry vaccines. In an attempt to develop a recombinant vaccine, a plant expression binary vector pBI121, containing the genes encoding Hemagglutinin–Neuraminidase (HN) and Fusion (F) epitopes of Newcastle Disease Virus (NDV) under the control of CaMV35S promoter and NOS terminator was constructed and introduced into the tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum) plant by Agrobacterium-mediated transformation. Results: Putative transgenic plantswere screened in a selectionmediumcontaining 50mg/L kanamycin and 30mg/L meropenem. Integration of the foreign gene in plant genomewas confirmed by PCR. Expression of foreign genewas analyzed at transcription level by RT-PCR and at translation level by means of dot blotting and ELISA. All analyses confirmed the expression of recombinant protein. Conclusion: Developments in genetic engineering have led to plant-based systems for recombinant vaccine production. In this research, tobacco plant was used to express F and HN epitopes of NDV. Our results indicate that for the production of recombinant vaccine, it is a novel strategy to use concatenated epitopes without their genetic fusion onto larger scaffold structure such as viral coat protein.

Keywords