The use of legume seed for expression and storage of high value proteins

Abstract

There is an ever growing need for the use of recombinant proteins both in medicine and industry; however their widespread use is limited by the lack of production capacity. Transgenic plants offer the possibility to produce and deliver recombinant proteins on a large scale with low production costs and with minimal purification or enrichment requirements. Among crop plants, legumes have great potential as a protein production platform because of their naturally high protein content, nutritional value, independence of N-nutrition, pollen containment, available processing technology, storage stability etc. There have been several proof-of-principle attempts to produce large amounts of recombinant protein in seed of both soybean and pea, however, our knowledge of processes regulating the foreign protein production and deposition is still limited.