Plant biofarming: Novel insights for peptide expression in heterologous systems

Peptide expression methods have been widely studied and developed from many different biological sources. The cultivation of prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells has proven to be efficient for the expression of foreign peptides in several heterologous systems, including bacteria, insects, yeasts, and mammals. Earlier reports brought up new insights for the improvement of expressed products to not only increase the production rate of desired peptides but also reproduce desirable post-translational modifications and even to reduce the risk of allergenicity when those products are aimed for human use. The development of bioreactor systems provided the optimization of cell growth conditions to scale up the amounts of expressed peptides. On the other hand, different cell systems and mutants provided a plethora of possible peptide modifications. Hence, in this report, we describe the many organisms and systems used for the large scale production of several macromolecules with relevance in health and agriculture. We also bring into discussion plant biofarming in the moss Physcomitrella patens and its recent adaptations, as a cost-effective and efficient approach in the production of more complex heterologous proteins, given the fact that its glycosylation pattern can be engineered to avoid allergenicity to humans (common to plant-derived glycoproteins). (C) 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Biopolymers (Pept Sci) 98: 416-427, 2012.