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.
Highlights
Many available evidences showed that the frequent use of large amounts of conventional antibiotics result in drug resistant pathogens, antibiotic-resistant bacteria
Microbial systems are the most widely employed as they are easy to manipulate and have rapid growth rates, multiplication times and high cell densities [100]. Bacterial species such as Escherichia coli, Bacillus subtilis, Propionibacterium freudenreichii were used for expression of different Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) like adenoregulin, cecropin, crustin, defensin, hepcidin, histonin, human β defensin, lactoferrin, perinerin, thanatin and viscotoxin [101]
Disease-resistant plant traits developed by introducing AMPs might increase yields and offer safety of agricultural products against phytopathogens
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Native AMPs can be classified according to source, activity, structure and amino acid residues wherein examples include but are not limited to defensins [22], cathelicidins [23], cecropins [24], lactoferricin [25], dermcidin [26], and anionic peptides [11] Since their discovery, AMPs have been of great scientific interest due to their importance in human health, as natural antibiotic agents, and due to their potential as innate immune modulators [27]. Certain AMPs exert a broad spectrum of activity against diseases in plant species caused by different plant pathogens including bacterial, fungal and viral pathogens [28] They represent an innovative crop plant protection method for engineering insect or disease resistance traits for sustainable agriculture. Some of the major advances in the field with the view to provide insights on the production of AMPs in plants are presented
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