Molecular Farming and Strategies to Increase the Production of Recombinant Proteins in Plants

Abstract

Objective The demand for recombinant proteins with therapeutic use is dramatically increasing; so that the traditional pharmaceutical industry will not be alone to answer the demand for now and upcoming generations. During the past two decades, plant bioreactors has gained more popularity over other conventional methods for several reasons. Among these reasons are scalability, high production rates, low production costs, ability to perform post‐translational modifications, and biosafety of the bioreactor. So far, many important pharmaceutical proteins have been produced using molecular farming technology. In this paper, it has been tried besides a brief description of molecular farming history, types of plant-based systems and molecular farming challenges, appropriate strategies and methods to solve the challenges in this field were being discussed and reviewed. Results Despite the very promising advances in the field of molecular farming, we still face two serious challenges which needs to be taken seriously; insufficient accumulation levels of recombinant proteins and lack of efficient purification methods. To achieve the high levels of production, several factors should be taken into consideration, such as choice of a suitable promoter or enhancer elements, codon optimization, appropriate subcellular localization, the use of fusion tags and etc. Chromatography methods are routinely used in the pharmaceutical industry for protein purification. Application of these methods has a lot of restrictionsduo to scalability, cost and column pollution problems for purification of plant-derived pharmaceutical proteins. Conclusions Various fusion protein strategies have been developed not only to increase the yield of plant-derived recombinant proteins, but also to facilitate purification steps.

Keywords

• molecular farming
• plant bioreactors
• protein fusion tags
• recombinant protein purification