Abstract: The present invention provides plant-derived agents to interfere with the nonstructural NS1 gene from the influenza A virus subtype H1N1. More particularly, the siRNAs that exhibit strong inhibitory activity towards NS1, which effectively suppress replication of the influenza virus in mammalian cells. The invention further provides methods for production of siRNAs for the suppression of a broad range of influenza viral subtypes with sequence homologies.

Abstract: The invention relates to genetically modified plants and progeny thereof which constitute edible plant-derived mucosal vaccines and injectable plant-derived mucosal vaccines against Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS). The invention relates to a recombinant vector that transforms specifically, but not limited to, the nuclei and/or plastids of tobacco, tomato and lettuce plants for antigen production. In specific embodiments, the plastid transformation vector expressing the nucleotide sequences are pCV1, pCV6 and pCV8, and their derivatives containing an S1 with nucleotide (but not amino acid) changes to optimize codon usage for expression in plants. The present invention relates to methods of making the modified plants which comprises transformation of plants with vectors for nuclear expression and/or plastid expression of nucleotide sequences of the SARS-CoV virus, fragments, derivatives, analogs, or variants thereof.