Current application status of baculovirus expression vector system

Abstract:

Baculoviruses are enveloped viruses with double stranded DNA, and specifically infect invertebrates. It produces two types of virions during the life cycle: budded viruses (BVs) and occlusion-derived viruses (ODVs). Baculouvirus has been used as an efficient eukaryotic expression vector to produce recombinant viruses for the expression of heterologous proteins in insect cells. Furthermore, heterologous proteins displayed on the surface of BVs have been widely used to screen specific targets in the fields of medicine, clinical treatment, biology and so on. Moreover, Baculovirus is unable to proliferate in mammalian cells, so it won’t trigger strong immune response in mammals and won?t cause function and tissue damage. Due to these unique advantages, Baculovirus has been developed as a gene therapy vector with a bright prospect in the concerned fields of oncotherapy, tissue regeneration and targeting drugs delivery. This review summarizes the developments of genetically modified baculoviruses in the fields of protein expression, surface display and gene therapy, which will provide theoretical basis for the improvement and wide application of genetically modified baculoviruses.