Biotechnological Insights on the Expression and Production of Antimicrobial Peptides in Plants

Abstract

The emergence of drug-resistant pathogens poses a serious critical threat to global public health and requires immediate action. Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) are a class of short peptides ubiquitously found in all living forms, including plants, insects, mammals, microorganisms and play a significant role in host innate immune system. These peptides are considered as promising candidates to treat microbial infections due to its distinct advantages over conventional antibiotics. Given their potent broad spectrum of antimicrobial action, several AMPs are currently being evaluated in preclinical/clinical trials. However, large quantities of highly purified AMPs are vital for basic research and clinical settings which is still a major bottleneck hindering its application. This can be overcome by genetic engineering approaches to produce sufficient amount of diverse peptides in heterologous host systems. Recently plants are considered as potential alternatives to conventional protein production systems such as microbial and mammalian platforms due to their unique advantages such as rapidity, scalability and safety. In addition, AMPs can also be utilized for development of novel approaches for plant protection thereby increasing the crop yield. Hence, in order to provide a spotlight for the expression of AMP in plants for both clinical or agricultural use, the present review presents the importance of AMPs and efforts aimed at producing recombinant AMPs in plants for molecular farming and plant protection so far.

Potential for Developing Plant-Derived Candidate Vaccines and Biologics against Emerging Coronavirus Infections

“… Schematic representation of available plant-based production technologies (stable, transient, and suspension cultures) for the production of recombinant vaccines and biologics [ 74 ]. …”

Functional Characterization of Pembrolizumab Produced in Nicotiana benthamiana Using a Rapid Transient Expression System

“…In recent days, plants are widely used for pharmaceutical and industrial protein production, such as human growth factors, cytokines, enzymes, anti-microbial peptides, vaccines, antibodies, and diagnostic reagents ( Obembe et al, 2011 ; Donini and Marusic, 2019 ; Diego-Martin et al, 2020 ; Porngarm et al, 2020 ; Rattanapisit et al, 2020 ; Shanmugaraj et al, 2020a , 2021 ; Siriwattananon et al, 2020 ). The plant-based platforms can reduce the investment costs for upstream processing and manufacturing while addressing simple, rapid, and versatile technology for protein production in a short period of time ( Buyel and Fischer, 2012 ; Mir-Artigues et al, 2019 ).…”

Multitalented Synthetic Antimicrobial Peptides and Their Antibacterial, Antifungal and Antiviral Mechanisms

“…There are obvious, multiple advantages of AMPs over classical antibiotics. As previously describes, AMPs are easy to synthesize, thanks to recent advances in automated protein synthesis, or can alternatively be produced in large quantities in heterologous expression systems, either in microbial cells or in plants [ 153 ]. In addition, AMPs are largely prone to chemical modification, aimed at overcoming inherent problems, such as susceptibility to enzymatic degradation, chemical/physical instability and toxicity to host cells, thus optimizing molecules’ features and smoothing their pathway towards the clinics [ 154 ].…”