molecular farming, or bio-pharming, has recently received much of attention for production of valuable recombinant proteins, with a few already being marketed. the use of whole plants for synthesis of pharmaceutical proteins offers various advantages in economy, scalability and safety over conventional production systems. gm plants are suitable for the inexpensive production of large amounts of...

Plant bioreactors are attractive expression systems for economic production of pharmaceuticals. Various plant expression systems or platforms have been tested with certain degrees of success over the past years. However, further development and improvement are needed for more effective plant bioreactors. In this review we first summarize recent progress in various plant bioreactor expression sy...

Plants are attractive expression systems for the economic production of recombinant proteins. Among the different plant-based systems, plant seed is the leading platform and holds several advantages such as high protein yields and stable storage of target proteins. Significant advances in using seeds as bioreactors have occurred in the past decade, which include the first commercialized plant-d...

Recombinant production of pharmaceutical proteins is crucial, not only for personalized medicine. While most biopharmaceuticals are currently produced in mammalian cell culture, plant-made pharmaceuticals gain momentum. Post-translational modifications in plants are similar to those in humans, however, existing differences may affect quality, safety and efficacy of the products. A frequent modi...

Sulfate-rich mine water must be treated before it is released into natural water bodies. We tested ethanol as substrate in bioreactors designed for biological sulfate removal from mine water containing up to 9 g L-1 sulfate, using granular sludge from an industrial waste water treatment plant as inoculum. The pH, redox potential, and sulfate and sulfide concentrations were measured twice a week...

Various strategies have been developed to exploit plants as bioreactors for the production of pharmaceutical antibodies, to engineer antibody-mediated pathogen resistance or to alter the plant phenotype by immunomodulation. Recent research developments focus on the fine-tuning of expression systems and the detailed characterisation of recombinant products, including the implications of plant-sp...

Growing hairy roots in bioreactors has proven challenging. Here we summarize the recent work using a novel bioreactor, the mist reactor, for the culture of hairy roots from many plant species. Compared to most liquid-phase bioreactors, this gasphase bioreactor offers a completely different environment for growing roots. Design, modeling, and some of the unique engineering aspects inherent to mi...