Chloroplasts: The Future of Large-Scale Protein Production

Abstract

Chloroplast engineering has matured considerably in recent years. It is emerging as a promising tool to address the challenges related to food security, drug production, and sustainable energy posed by an ever-growing world population. Chloroplasts have proven their potential by efficiently expressing transgenes, encapsulating recombinant proteins, and protecting them from cellular machinery, making it possible to obtain highly functional proteins. This quality has also been exploited by interfering RNA technology. In addition to the practical attributes offered by chloroplast transformation, such as the elimination of position effects, polycistronic expression, and massive protein production, the technique represents an advance in biosafety terms; however, even if its great biotechnological potential, crops that have efficiently transformed are still a proof of concept. Despite efforts, other essential crops have remained recalcitrant to chloroplast transformation, which has limited their expansion. In this chapter, we address the most recent advances in this area and the challenges that must be solved to extend the transformation to other crops and become the de facto tool in plant biotechnology.