N-glyco-engineering in plants: Update on strategies and major achievements

Abstract

Plants are being developed as a cost-effective production system for biopharmaceuticals in large quantities. Although plants properly fold and assemble complex proteins from human origin, one issue that needs to be addressed is their glycan structure. In the past years we have been witnessing outstanding results in targeted manipulation of the plant N -glycosylation pathway allowing recombinant proteins to be produced with human-type oligosaccharides at large homogeneity. This opens new possibility in manufacturing next-generation biopharmaceuticals. This review presents a variety of technologies and strategies that are being employed to engineer the plant N -glycosylation, thus pointing to the enormous potential of plants being used as a novel production system with unique features and possibilities.