Recent advances in plastid transformation

Plastid transformation offers a viable alternative to nuclear transformation because of its numerous advantages. It was against this backdrop that various groups of researchers have been exploiting this group of sub-cellular organelles, over the last two decades, for the genetic engineering of agronomic traits and metabolic pathways, as well as for molecular farming for the production of plant-derived high-valued biopharmaceuticals and industrial proteins. In this short review, we discuss the evolution and development of this technology with respect to the current state-of-the-art, which places it in high pedestal as a cost effective and safe production technology for high quality molecular farming products as well as a highly efficient method to create new metabolic pathways and improve the agronomic traits.