Plant cell cultures as new plataforms for the production of recombinant proteins

SCAN Seminar

Title: Plant cell cultures as new plataforms for the production of recombinant proteins

Speaker: Ana Sofia Pires

Afilliation: Plant Cell Biology

Abstrat

Plant cell cultures have been proposed as valuable systems to produce a wide range of biologically active proteins providing certain advantages over whole plants and other expressing systems. In summary, plant derived proteins are considered cheaper to produce and store, easier to scale up for mass production and safer than those derived from animal systems. Furthermore, and in contrast with prokaryote systems, plants are able to perform complex glycosylation. Additionally, plant cell suspension cultures combine the advantages of plant systems with cell culture production. They allow precise control over growth conditions, batch-to-batch product consistency, easy containment and process control according to good manufacturing practices (GMP), simple purification processes for secreted proteins, and very low maintenance cost, when compared with other alternative cell culture systems such as mammalian or insect cells.
In our lab we are exploring two new production platforms, Medicago truncatula and Arabidopsis cell suspension cultures. Medicago truncatula has proven to be an excellent platform for the production of foreign proteins. Arabidopsis thaliana represents an ideal model for probing studies, since it is a model plant with a fully sequenced genome and there are a large number of mutant lines and genomic resources available.
We are also assessing recombinant proteins from different origins: fungal phytase from Aspergillus niger and Human Erythropoietin (EPO). These proteins are highly glycosylated which allows for studying differences in glycosylation patterns. We are also studying the localization of the recombinant protein at the subcellular level. Our aim is to test Arabidopsis and Medicago cell suspension cultures to study the particular features of different plant species as potential bioreactors.