Plant Molecular Pharming Methods, Tools, Challenges Ahead for Production of Recombinant Proteins, and Potential Solutions

Abstract

PMF (Plant Molecular Farming) consists of repurposing intact plants or plant cell cultures as an alternative and novel heterologous expression system to produce recombinant proteins. It is safer and more cost-effective to produce recombinant proteins using plant cells rather than traditional expression platforms like bacteria and mammalian cells. As a result, they are an exciting platform for molecular farming due to plants' ability to perform post-translational modification, such as glycosylation and phosphorylation, in a manner similar to their own. The PMF has several significant drawbacks, despite its safety and efficacy: low levels of expression, high inter-transformant variation, and the high cost of commercial purification methods. Our review chapter first emphasizes the importance of plant molecular farming in the production of recombinant proteins. Thereafter, we examine some of the existing plant systems and discuss their benefits and drawbacks that have been in use both for pharmaceutical and industrial applications for a long time. In addition, we discuss the different biotechnological procedures and techniques that are being developed to improve the quantity and quality of plant-derived recombinant proteins. With the introduction of molecular farming techniques, new methodologies and methods for overcoming the low expression levels of recombinant proteins are introduced. Among them are promoters, codon optimization, signal peptides that facilitate subcellular localization, purification methods, and genetic insulators.