Tobacco, a Platform for the Production of Recombinant Proteins

Abstract

Tobacco is readily amenable to genetic engineering and has many desirable agronomic attributes, like high biomass yield and high soluble protein levels that are essential for crops used to produce recombinant proteins. It is a non-food crop, making containment in an agricultural setting feasible. Most production systems are based on the accumulation of proteins in leaves, eliminating the need for flowering and pollen production. These attributes make tobacco an ideal bioreactor for the large-scale production of biopharmaceutical recombinant proteins. As a consequence, a wide variety of the recombinant proteins, from simple peptides to complicated multimeric molecules like hemoglobin or secretory antibodies, have been produced successfully in tobacco. Many of these proteins have therapeutic or industrial uses.