Abstract
Viral coat proteins expressed in plants often form virus-like particles (VLPs) which are good vaccine candidates as they are safe and highly immunogenic and can be easily purified. The VLPs can be purified by rate-zonal density centrifugation which is based on the size of the VLP or they can be purified by isopycnic centrifugation which is a fast and simple method and results in isolation of VLPs with the same density. Details on how to apply both rate-zonal and isopycnic centrifugation for VLP purification from plants are provided in this chapter.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Ed Rybicki, Ann Meyers, and everyone in the Biopharming Research Unit at University of Cape Town for their contribution to the development of the techniques. We acknowledge the National Research Foundation, Department of Science and Technology, the Poliomyelitis Research Foundation, the Medical Research Council, the University of Cape Town Research Committee, the Cancer Research Foundation of South Africa, the PlaProVa project of the EU FP7 initiative, and Era Biotech for funding.
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© 2016 Springer Science+Business Media New York
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van Zyl, A.R., Hitzeroth, I.I. (2016). Purification of Virus-Like Particles (VLPs) from Plants. In: Thomas, S. (eds) Vaccine Design. Methods in Molecular Biology, vol 1404. Humana, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-3389-1_37
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-3389-1_37
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Publisher Name: Humana, New York, NY
Print ISBN: 978-1-4939-3388-4
Online ISBN: 978-1-4939-3389-1
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