Emerging and re-emerging zoonotic diseases cause serious illness with billions of cases, and millions of deaths. The most effective way to restrict the spread of zoonotic viruses among humans and animals and prevent disease is vaccination. Recombinant proteins produced in plants offer an alternative approach for the development of safe, effective, inexpensive candidate vaccines. Current strategies are focused on the production of highly immunogenic structural proteins, which mimic the organizations of the native virion but lack the viral genetic material. These include chimeric viral peptides, subunit virus proteins, and virus-like particles (VLPs). The latter, with their ability to self-assemble and thus resemble the form of virus particles, are gaining traction among plant-based candidate vaccines against many infectious diseases. In this review, we summarized the main zoonotic diseases and followed the progress in using plant expression systems for the production of recombinant proteins and VLPs used in the development of plant-based vaccines against zoonotic viruses.
Keywords: Chikungunya virus; Crimean–Congo hemorrhagic fever virus; Ebola virus; HIV; Hantaviruses; Henipaviruses; Hepatitis E virus; Newcastle virus; West Nile virus; Zika virus; dengue virus; emerging coronaviruses; plant molecular farming; rabies virus; recombinant vaccines; virus-like particles; yellow fever virus; zoonotic influenza; zoonotic viruses.