Why are plants being used to produce pharmaceutical and industrial proteins?
Many proteins are valuable, either for use in medicine (e.g. vaccines, blood products, hormones) or in industry (e.g. enzymes). Normally they are produced as recombinant proteins in bacteria or, in the case of human proteins, in mammalian cells. The problem with this approach is that bacteria cannot make complex human proteins, and mammalian cells are very expensive and are limited in scale. Plants have the potential to address both these problems because they can make complex human proteins and are inexpensive to grow at a large scale.
