Molecular Pharming: Applications, Challenges and Emerging Areas

This comprehensive book communicates the recent advances in, and exciting potential for, the expanding area of plant biotechnology and is divided into six sections. The first three sections look at the current status of the field, and advances in plant platforms and strategies for improving yields, downstream processing, and controlling post–translational modifications of plant–made recombinant proteins. Section four reviews high–value industrial and pharmacological proteins that are successfully being produced in established and emerging plant platforms. The fifth section looks at regulatory challenges facing the expansion of the field. The final section turns its focus toward small molecule therapeutics, drug screening, plant–specialized metabolites, and plants as model organisms to study human disease processes.

Molecular Pharming: Applications, Challenges, and Emerging Areas offers in–depth coverage of molecular biology of plant expression systems and manipulation of glycosylation processes in plants; plant platforms, subcellular targeting, recovery, and downstream processing; plant–derived protein pharmaceuticals and case studies; regulatory issues; and emerging areas. It is a valuable resource for researchers that are in the field of plant molecular pharming, as well as for those conducting basic research in gene expression, protein quality control, and other subjects relevant to molecular and cellular biology.

Broad–ranging coverage of a key area of plant biotechnology Describes efforts to produce pharmaceutical and industrial proteins in plants Provides reviews of recent advances and technology breakthroughs Assesses realities of regulatory and cost hurdles Forward–looking with coverage of small molecule technologies and the use of plants as models of human disease processes

Providing wide–ranging and unique coverage, Molecular Pharming: Applications, Challenges, and Emerging Areas will be of great interest to the plant science, plant biotechnology, protein science, and pharmacological communities.

Allison R. Kermode is Professor and Michael Smith Senior Scholar at Simon Fraser University. Her work on plant–derived human proteins was recently featured in Nature magazine. Dr. Kermode is also the editor of Seed Dormancy: Methods and Protocols.

Liwen Jiang is Choh–Ming Li Professor of Life Sciences at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is a leader in research on protein targeting and trafficking in plant cells, plant organelle biogenesis and function, and the application of these processes to plant biotechnology.