Preventing Bird Flu with tomatoes?! Yes, this is what the Australian scientist Amanda Walmsley says she is trying to grow — a bird flu vaccine in tomatoes to be used to prevent the disease in chickens. Walmsley has been the part of a Monash University team that developed a plant-made vaccine for Newcastle disease — a virus that affects poultry. And now its the turn for the Bird Flu virus, according to the Melbourne Herald Sun.
‘Developing vaccines in tomatoes would allow vaccines to be fed to birds rather than injected… We just harvest the fruit, freeze-dry it and there’s your vaccine… That would be a lot easier than giving injections — especially for a flock of 5,000 chickens,” she said.
She explained researchers remove a gene from a protective protein in the bird flu virus and then put it in the tomato plant where it would reproduce the protein.
Via: Physorg