ABSTRACT
This chapter presents state of available methodology and provides an overview of subunit vaccines. It discusses the basic techniques and the options available for utilizing recombinant DNA technology. Vaccines made by conventional technologies fall into some major categories. The ability to produce virtually any protein in a pure form and in large quantities has been a viable proposition since the late 1970s when the gene for human insulin was expressed in Escherichia coli. Thus, if the protein sequence is known, DNA encoding these proteins can be synthesized. Once a candidate gene encoding a protein antigen has been cloned it must be further sub cloned to enable the protein to be expressed in reasonable quantities. Large-scale purification of recombinant proteins from culture broths presents its own unique set of problems and is generally beyond the scope of this chapter except to mention that recombinant DNA techniques can be utilized to aid purification.
