Production of recombinant proteins in plants for pharmaceutical use<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

Preťová Anna, Klubicová Katarína, Obert Bohuš

Institute of Plant Genetics and Biotechnology, <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />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.