Recent advances in optimization strategies and applications of plant bioreactors

ABSTRACT

Plant bioreactors have been the central part of molecular pharming. Vaccines, antibodies and functional foods produced by plant bioreactors with the benefits of cost-effectiveness, high scalability, rapid production, enabling post-translational modification, and no harmful pathogens contamination are increasingly accepted by the public. In February 2022, Health Canada approved the world's first plant-derived human vaccine Covifenz® for the prevention and treatment of COVID-19, marking the advent of the era of molecular pharming represented by plant bioreactors. This paper elaborates the development history of plant bioreactors, with the main host species representatives of leafy plants and seed plants, the stable and transient expression systems construction for various applications, as well as the enhancement strategies through promoter and codon optimization, "humanization” of glycosylation process, inhibition of gene silencing and protease activity, and also summarize the application of plant-derived protein products, which aim to provide a theoretical and application basis for the development of plant bioreactors. © 2023, China Biotechnology Press. All rights reserved.