Plant seed-derived human transferrin: expression, characterisation and applications

Abstract

Introduction Human serum transferrin plays a critical physiological role in cellular iron delivery via the transferrin receptor-mediated endocytosis pathway in nearly all eukaryotic organisms. It is widely used in mamma-lian cell cultures for the production of biotherapeutic proteins and vaccines and is also being explored for use as a therapy and targeted drug delivery system to treat a number of diseases. With the increasing concerns over the risk of transmission of infectious pathogenic agents of human plasma-derived transferrin, recombinant production of human serum transferrin has been pursued in various heterolo-gous expression systems. However, high costs and limited yields of re-combinant human serum transferrin remain the major challenges to many expression systems. Recently, rice seed-based expression system has been shown to produce large amounts of inexpensive and animal-free re-combinant human serum transferrin. Here, we review the rice-derived re-combinant human serum transferrin: its cost-effective production, molecular and functional characterisation, as well as its many potential therapeutic and clinical applications.