Introduction: Plant-Produced Protein Products

Abstract

Recombinant protein production in plants encompasses vaccines, pharmaceuticals, and industrial proteins. Within each of these categories are numerous products and host systems with applications to multiple diseases and industrial processes. This industry requires gene transfer from other organisms into plants and allows the plants to overproduce the proteins for the desired application.Several companies and university laboratories have had programs in plant expression of proteins over the past two decades. The plant biotechnology companies that are focused on production of those proteins are listed in Table 1.1. Significant effort has gone into developing these new products using several plant systems. The choice of system depends on many factors including the type of protein, the technology utilized, the platform of the company, and the funding source (Howard and Hood 2005). Several of these companies are still functional, and others have closed but reemerged as new entities.