Glyco-engineering N. benthamiana for human vaccine

Developing vaccines against parasitic worms (or helminths) has been proven rather difficult, with one of the problems being their sustainable production. Native antigens have previously proven to be the most effective. However, in order to collect these antigens, donor animals need to be infected with the parasites and subsequently sacrificed to collect the material. This makes production scale up difficult and might bring up ethical concerns. Classic recombinant production systems, like yeast or bacteria, have been tried but can lead to vaccines with lower efficacies due to differences in N-glycosylation. Nicotiana benthamiana has previously proven to be an effective platoform for engineering recombinant proteins with specific non-plant glycans. This PhD project will aim to produce effective vaccines against human infecting helminths in N. benthamiana. To do this, CRISPR will be used to knock-out enzymes responsible for the creation of plant-specific N-glycan motifs. Subsequently, in those plants, vaccine antigens will be transiently co-expressed wit hhelminth specific glycosylation enzymes. The result of this project will be a scalable platform to effectively produce vaccines with helminth specific N-glycans.