Abstract
Chloroplast genetic engineering is becoming an attractive field in plant biotechnology. It offers several unique advantages, including high-level transgene expression, multi-gene engineering in a single transformation event and transgene containment by maternal inheritance, as well as lack of gene silencing, position and pleiotropic effects and undesirable foreign DNA. The hyper-expression of recombinant proteins within plastids offers a cost effective solution for using plants as bioreactors. Many transgenes have been stably integrated and expressed via the tobacco chloroplast genome to confer important agronomic traits including herbicide, insect, and disease resistance, drought and salt tolerance, and phytoremediation. Moreover, many vaccine antigens and biopharmaceutical proteins have been expressed at high levels via the chloroplast genome and their functionality has been evaluated using in vitro cell cultures as well as challenge with bacterial or viral pathogens using animal models. This technology has been extended to other crop species for the introduction of agronomic traits and production of low cost vaccine antigens and therapeutic proteins. Production of therapeutic proteins in chloroplasts eliminates the expensive fermentation technology. In addition, oral delivery of chloroplast-derived therapeutic proteins should eliminate expensive purification steps, cold storage, cold transportation and delivery via sterile needles, thereby further decreasing their cost. Apart from the successful productions of vaccines and therapeutic proteins, chloroplast technology is also a good platform for the production of industrial products. Recently this technology has been extended for the production of enzymes used in ethanol production. In this chapter, we describe the overall concept of the chloroplast technology and the current status of chloroplast-derived vaccine antigens and biopharmaceutical proteins.
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