Prof George Lomonossoff discusses how plant viruses are able to subvert the metabolism of a host. But viruses can also be useful and can be exploited to produce novel products in plants.
Viruses are remarkable entities that invade a host and use it to make multiple copies of themselves. Plant viruses in particular, have very small genomes often consisting of one or more segments of positive RNA. Because of their simplicity and ease of growth, the study of plant viruses made a substantial contribution to the development of modern molecular biology, structural biology and molecular genetics. Here, Prof George Lomonossoff discusses how plant viruses are able to subvert the metabolism of a host but this can be used for various applications. Focussing on the Cowpea mosaic virus (CPMV), this virus grows efficiently and has an ordered structure that can be genetically or chemically modified for use in bio- and nanotechnology.
00:00 Introduction
03:51 The Cowpea Mosaic Virus
06:53 Using viruses to grow vaccines in plants
12:45 Cloning 101 animation
16:56 Other applications of plant viruses
19:24 Making poliovirus vaccine
25:32 A new translational facility
Speaker profile: Prof George Lomonossoff is a Project Leader in the Department of Chemistry at the John Innes Centre, Norwich. After completing his Ph.D. at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, George joined the John Innes Centre in 1980. He is now a project Leader in the Department of Biological Chemistry. In 1987, George became a Fulbright Scholar and spent a year at Cornell University in New York State in the US. Ten years later, he spent another period as a Visiting Investigator at The Scripps Research Institute, California, USA. In 2012, George, together with his Ph.D. student Frank Sainsbury, was named “BBSRC Innovator of the year” for work on the development of virus-based plant expression technologies and in 2015 he delivered the Society of General Microbiology Colworth Prize Lecture for translational research. The research developed in George’s laboratory has been used worldwide and is the technology currently being utilised by Leaf Expression Systems, a facility based on the Norwich Research Park. He is currently an honorary professor at the Universities of East Anglia and Nottingham and was president of the International Society for Plant Molecular Farming.
Filmed at the Gatsby Plant Science Summer School, 2019.