Ubiquitin assisted production of multivalent vaccine in yeast

"The goal of this proposal is to demonstrate the feasibility to express in a short period of time a large number of malarial antigens by using ubiquitin fusion technology. We will design the yeast expression vectors for rapid cloning of a vast number ofmalarial genes. N-terminal of malarial antigens will be fused with C-terminus of ubiquitin to enhance quality and quantity of recombinant proteins in yeast. The following malarial candidate antigens will be included: multiepitope synthetic gene, FALVAC-1,AMA-1, CSP, EBA-175, LSA-1, MSP-1, PfHsp60, Pfs25, Pfs28 and SSP-2. These malarial antigens are components of the promising multivalent vaccine candidates. There is a consensus that an effective malaria vaccine will contain antigens or antigenicdeterminants from several stages. Thus, the methodology to express proteins quickly, and in large quantities will be an important advance. The success of this proposal will be proof of principle that new technique will allow cloning and expression of alarge number of antigens with improved quality and quantity in comparison with the existing methods. The presence of the multivalent antigen pool will serve as a vaccine candidate for immunological characterization in monkey model and further clinicaltesting. Anticipated improvement in protein expression and secretion will be of immediate use for protein production in general and for malaria antigens in particular. The success of Phase I will be c