Production of recombinant proteins in plants for pharmaceutical use

Preťová Anna, Klubicová Katarína, Obert Bohuš

Institute of Plant Genetics and Biotechnology, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Akademická 2, P.O. Box 39A, 950 07 Nitra, Slovak Republic,

Summary

Plants can be used as a production system for specific heterologous proteins, even those not naturally occurring in plants. Plants represent a new, simple and inexpensive system that allows the large-scale production of safe recombinant proteins.  Plants can be utilized as bio-reactors for the large-scale production of recombinant proteins, including antibodies, vaccines, other pharmaceuticals and industrial proteins. The process is often referred to as ’molecular farming’. The article describes the advantages of plant-based expression systems, the expression constructs, methods of plant transformation for production of recombinant proteins and the used plant-hosts systems.  The article also suggests ways for improving protein quality and yield and discusses the acceptability and the bio-safety issues of molecular farming.