Maximizing the Production of Recombinant Proteins in Plants: From Transcription to Protein Stability

Abstract

The production of therapeutic and industrial recombinant proteins in plants has advantages over established bacterial and mammalian systems in terms of cost, scalability, growth conditions, and product safety. In order to compete with these conventional expression systems, however, plant expression platforms must have additional economic advantages by demonstrating a high protein production yield with consistent quality. Over the past decades, important progress has been made in developing strategies to increase the yield of recombinant proteins in plants by enhancing their expression and reducing their degradation. Unlike bacterial and animal systems, plant expression systems can utilize not only cell cultures but also whole plants for the production of recombinant proteins. The development of viral vectors and chloroplast transformation has opened new strategies to drastically increase the yield of recombinant proteins from plants. The identification of promoters for strong, constitutive, and inducible promoters or the tissue-specific expression of transgenes allows for the production of recombinant proteins at high levels and for special purposes. Advances in the understanding of RNAi have led to effective strategies for reducing gene silencing and increasing recombinant protein production. An increased understanding of protein translation, quality control, trafficking, and degradation has also helped with the development of approaches to enhance the synthesis and stability of recombinant proteins in plants. In this review, we discuss the progress in understanding the processes that control the synthesis and degradation of gene transcripts and proteins, which underlie a variety of developed strategies aimed at maximizing recombinant protein production in plants.

The Potential of Plant-Produced Virus-like Particle Vaccines for African Horse Sickness and Other Equine Orbiviruses

“…Protein instability due to protease activity and the difficulties in directing protein expression to a suitable compartment within the plant cell can also contribute to lower productivity. There has been some success with both genetic and physical ways of increasing this productivity, but more work is still needed to improve the consistency of yields [ 94 , 95 , 96 ]. Due to the use of whole plants as an expression system, there is substantial downstream processing needed to extract the expressed protein.…”

Green biomanufacturing in recombinant collagen biosynthesis: trends and selection in various expression systems

“…A plant expression system is a genetic engineering system used to express genes of interest in plants. 55 The genes can be introduced into the plant genome through transfection or transformation. The genes can then be expressed in the plant by using a promoter derived from the plant itself or a different species.…”

“…Plant expression systems are often used to produce large quantities of proteins or other products that are difficult to obtain through other means. 55 The data suggest that plant-produced recombinant products are excellent alternatives to natural collagens used for various medical science research studies. Tobacco cells are among the most common expression hosts of plants and have been used as an expression system for producing human homotrimeric collagen.…”

“…Plant expression systems are often used to produce large quantities of proteins or other products that are difficult to obtain through other means. 55…”

Artificial intelligence-driven systems engineering for next-generation plant-derived biopharmaceuticals

“…For molecular pharming processes and products to be safe, it is crucial to implement effective containment strategies, risk assessment and mitigation measures. Techniques such as chloroplast expression and transient expression in closed culture systems could circumvent the environmental risk of transgene transmission through pollen ( Moon et al., 2019 ; Feng et al., 2022b ).…”