Plant vs. pathogen: enlisting tobacco in the fight against anthrax

In 2001, letters containing anthrax spores were mailed to newspapers and television stations in New York and to two U.S. senators on Capitol Hill, fueling fears that future attacks could be more widespread. Now University of Central Florida researchers are developing a technique to quickly produce hundreds of millions of doses of a potentially safer anthrax vaccine. The technique uses genetically modified tobacco plants to grow protective antigen, a component of the Bacillus anthracis bacterium that plays a key role in the vaccine. Unlike traditional anthrax vaccine created through fermentation, the plant-based version would be free of other, potentially more toxic components of the B. anthracis bacterium. Eventually, plant-based vaccines could be developed for other diseases as well, such as cholera, amebiasis, plague, and hepatitis.