Authors: Ahmed Ghannam Safa Kumari Serge Muyldermans Abdul Qader Abbady
Publish Date: 2015/02/04
Volume: 87, Issue: 4-5, Pages: 355-369
Abstract
Worldwide plant viral infections decrease seriously the crop production yield boosting the demand to develop new strategies to control viral diseases One of these strategies to prevent viral infections based on the immunomodulation faces many problems related to the ectopic expression of specific antibodies in planta Camelid nanobodies expressed in plants may offer a solution as they are an attractive tool to bind efficiently to viral epitopes cryptic or not accessible to conventional antibodies Here we report a novel generic approach that might lead to virus resistance based on the expression of camelid specific nanobodies against Broad bean mottle virus BBMV Eight nanobodies recognizing BBMV with high specificity and affinity were retrieved after phage display from a large ‘immune’ library constructed from an immunized Arabic camel By an in vitro assay we demonstrate how three nanobodies attenuate the BBMV spreading in inoculated Vicia faba plants Furthermore the in planta transient expression of these three selected nanobodies confirms their virus neutralizing capacity In conclusion this report supports that plant resistance against viral infections can be achieved by the in vivo expression of camelid nanobodiesThe authors would like to thank the Director General of the Atomic Energy Commission of Syria and the head of the Molecular Biology and Biotechnology department for their continuous support throughout this work We thank Mr Adnan AlAssad at General Commission for Scientific Agricultural Research GCSAR Deir ElHagar Station for Camelid Research Damascus Syria for housing and immunizing camels We also thank the lab of Patrice Dunoyer IBMP/CNRS institute Strasbourg FRANCE for kindly providing pBI61P19 construct and the lab of Sunil K Mukherjee ICGEB NewDelhi INDIA for kindly providing empty pBI121 vector
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