Let’s Go VirAl

Whereas production of vaccines and pharmaceutical interesting proteins is primarily done in cells of animal origin, these systems suffer from several disadvantages which are not seen with microalgae. For this reason, microalgae are being considered promising, save, alternative future production platforms. Their production is much cheaper and bioreactor systems are already available for growth and upscaling to support heterologous protein production. With the recent discovery of a relatively small microalgae DNA virus, we want to generate a fundamental knowledge base and establish a production platform in microalgae based on the use of the microalgae infecting virus as expression vector.