The Production and Delivery of Therapeutic Peptides in Plants

Abstract

There is a wide range of naturally-occurring peptides with immunophysiological function of particular relevance to the intestinal health and development of mammals. Our goal is to produce and deliver therapeutic peptides, such as growth factors and antimicrobial peptides, in feed and food plants. The chief advantage of this approach is the ability to produce large amounts of these peptides at low cost to augment endogenous levels of these factors in the intestine, especially in disease conditions when the levels of these factors may be low or otherwise inadequate, or to provide proteins with other novel immunophysiological properties not normally present in the gut. A major obstacle in this effort is achieving adequate levels of such peptides in plant tissue, due to problems with transcription, translation, degradation of the peptide or negative effects of the foreign protein on the growth and development of the plant. Our approach to this problem is to develop platform technologies involving fusion proteins and inducible expression systems, which can enhance the expression of small, biologically-active peptides in plant tissues for oral delivery.