重组蛋白在植物体中的表达及其应用

近年来,以植物为生物反应器异源表达和生产具有药用及商业价值的蛋白质发展迅速,某些产品已进入临床试验,且获得了很好的疗效;另一类在植物体中表达的具有重要农艺价值的蛋白质可介导植物抵抗病原体,即植物抗体介导的抗性,是植物抗病原体分子育种的又一途径.介绍了重组蛋白在植物体中表达及其应用的现状.     

WUSCHEL介导的固有免疫: 植物干细胞抵御病毒侵害的新机制

植物茎顶端分生组织干细胞是具有持续分化潜能的细胞团, 是植物体地上部所有组织和器官的来源。由于植物行固着生长模式, 其无法通过移动来趋利避害, 因此保护植物干细胞免受病毒和其它病原体侵害对于植物正常生长发育至关重要。尽管人们很早就观察到植物茎顶端干细胞区域与其它部位相比具有极强的抗病毒特性, 但很长时间以来对于植物干细胞如何抵御病毒侵染却知之甚少。近日, 中国科学技术大学赵忠团队阐明了拟南芥(Arabidopsis thaliana)茎顶端干细胞通过WUS蛋白介导的固有免疫反应抵御病毒侵害的机制。WUS能被黄瓜花叶病毒诱导表达, 并抑制病毒在茎尖中央区和周边区积累。WUS通过直接抑制S-腺苷-L-甲硫氨酸依赖的甲基转移酶(SAM MTase)基因的转录, 影响rRNA的加工和核糖体的稳定性, 使病毒蛋白质合成受阻, 从而阻止病毒的复制与传播。该研究揭示了植物体的一种保守且广谱抗病毒策略, 具有重要的理论意义和应用价值。     

植物响应金属胁迫重要蛋白质的细胞定位

土壤中的Hg2+、Pb2+、Cd2+、Cu2+、Zn2+、Mn2+、Fe2+/Fe3+等金属离子对植物体具有毒害作用。植物体通过定位于细胞壁、细胞膜,以及各种细胞器中的蛋白质应答重金属胁迫过程。植物体利用细胞壁蛋白质与重金属离子络合,细胞膜系统的转运蛋白与通道调节金属离子运输、细胞器或细胞质基质中的分子伴侣帮助蛋白质折叠等机制完成抑制金属离子进入体内或在体内的解毒等过程。综述了近年来植物响应金属离子胁迫重要蛋白质的细胞定位与作用机制。     

用转基因植物生产基因工程疫苗

用转基因植物生产外源蛋白质产品是一个有吸引力的廉价生产系统,它有可能替代外源蛋白质的发酵生产系统。通过外源基因的瞬时表达或稳定表达方式,多种疫苗已在植物中产生,在植物中表达的抗原保持了它自身的免疫原性,植物在这方面的应用具有独特的优点。     

用转基因植物生产基因工程疫苗

用转基因植物生产外源蛋白质产品是一个有吸引力的廉价生产系统,它有可能替代外源蛋白质的发酵生产系统。通过外源基因的瞬时表达或稳定表达方式,多种疫苗已在植物中产生,在植物中表达的抗原保持了它自身的免疫原性,植物在这方面的应用具有独特的优 点。     

植物microRNA与逆境响应研究进展

MieroRNA(miRNA)是一类在生物体内普遍存在的非编码、长度约16～29 nt的小分子RNA,由内源基因编码,于转录后水平通过介导靶mRNA降解或翻译抑制调控基因表达,是真核细胞基因表达的重要调控因子.随着生物信息学与研究技术的发展,越来越多的植物miRNA得到预测和验证.逆境胁迫下,植物体诱导或下调相关miRNA表达,参与植物逆境生理调节与适应.文章综述了植物miRNA生物合成、与靶基因的作用方式,生物功能以及逆境胁迫响应miRNA,概要介绍了目前常用的miRNA研究方法.     

植物SET蛋白

SET蛋白是一类包含保守的SET结构域、与组蛋白甲基化密切相关的蛋白质。组蛋白修饰作为调控基因表达的重要因素,在植物体基因转录调控中发挥关键的作用。有关SET蛋白的研究为深入了解组蛋白修饰的机制提供了重要信息。植物SET蛋白具有保守的结构特征及进化机制,参与众多细胞核内的反应过程,如染色体的浓缩和分离,基因的转录,以及DNA的复制和修复等,调控植物基因的表达,影响植物体的发育。     

生产疫苗的植物表达系统

综述了近些年来转基因植物作为疫苗表达系统的新进展,比较了植物表达系统相对其他表达系统的优点,介绍了不同介导方式的植物表达系统,包括农杆菌介导的转化和重组植物病毒表达疫苗,讨论了提高表达效率的载体构建策略,对其应用前景提出了展望。     

核糖体失活蛋白及其在植物抗真菌病基因工程中的应用

真菌病是农作物减产的主要原因之一。而植物界大量存在着具有离体抑制真菌生长增殖能力的蛋白质,核糖体失活蛋白（ＲＩＰ,ｒｉｂｏｓｏｍｅ ｉｎａｃｔｉｖａｔｉｎｇ ｐｒｏｔｅｉｎ）就是其一。它能特异地水解核糖体ＲＮＡ ３′－端茎环结构的腺嘌呤残基而导致核糖体失活,进而抑制蛋白合成。但它却不使自身的核糖体失活,只对其它物种核糖体显示高度特异性,这显然具有防止外来病原体侵染的功能。利用基因工程技术,使其在一些经济作物中高效表达,筛选具有抗性的转基因植株,这正日益成为植物真菌病防治的新途径。它克服了常规育种周期长,抗性种质缺乏的弊端,更避免了施用农药带来的环境污染等问题,其应用前景甚为广阔。围绕其在真菌病基因工程中的应用,本文对核糖体失活蛋白在植物体中的分布、分类、生化、结构、功能特性、作用机制以及应用前景等作简要、全面的     

融合基因在转基因植物中的应用

目前双基因和多基因转基因植物已经商品化,并展现了广泛的应用前景。但在转基因植物研究中,使多个基因同时在植物体中表达调控依然很难实现,是植物基因工程和生物技术发展中的难点。融合基因表达载体作为一种新型的方法,弥补了获得双价或多价转基因植物传统方法的缺点,具有更高的应用价值。本文对目前构建融合基因的方法作了评述,并对比较新颖的连接肽2A和LP4做了详细介绍。     

亲免素在植物体内的功能研究进展

亲免素(immunophilin)是一种免疫抑制剂受体,广泛存在于细菌、病毒、真菌、植物和动物等生物体中。植物体内亲免素由FK506结合蛋白(FKBPs)、亲环素(CYPs)和parvulin蛋白构成。大多数亲免素具有肽基脯氨酰顺反异构酶活性,可以作为分子伴侣指导蛋白质的正确折叠。该文总结了亲免素在激素信号传递、光合作用、胁迫响应及基因表达等方面的最新研究进展,并对今后该领域的研究进行了展望。     

Molecular farming of pharmaceutical proteins

Molecular farming is the production of pharmaceutically important and commercially valuable proteins in plants. Its purpose is to provide a safe and inexpensive means for the mass production of recombinant pharmaceutical proteins. Complex mammalian proteins can be produced in transformed plants or transformed plant suspension cells. Plants are suitable for the production of pharmaceutical proteins on a field scale because the expressed proteins are functional and almost indistinguishable from their mammalian counterparts. The breadth of therapeutic proteins produced by plants range from interleukins to recombinant antibodies. Molecular farming in plants has the potential to provide virtually unlimited quantities of recombinant proteins for use as diagnostic and therapeutic tools in health care and the life sciences. Plants produce a large amount of biomass and protein production can be increased using plant suspension cell culture in fermenters, or by the propagation of stably transformed plant lines in the field. Transgenic plants can also produce organs rich in a recombinant protein for its long-term storage. This demonstrates the promise of using transgenic plants as bioreactors for the molecular farming of recombinant therapeutics, including vaccines, diagnostics, such as recombinant antibodies, plasma proteins, cytokines and growth factors. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Sialylated endogenous glycoconjugates in plant cells

Bioengineered plants are emerging as promising systems for the production of therapeutically valuable proteins. It has been commonly accepted that plants do not perform mammalian-like post-translational modifications, particularly sialylation of glycoconjugates, and no evidence has previously been reported to suggest that they have such capabilities. Here we report the presence of sialylated glycoconjugates in suspension-cultured cells of Arabidopsis thaliana and suggest that a genetic and enzymatic basis for sialylation exists in plants.     

Antibody molecular farming in plants and plant cells

`Molecular Farming' is a novel approach to the production of pharmaceuticals, where valuable recombinant proteins can be produced in transgenic organisms on an agricultural scale. Plants have been traditionally used as a source of medicines, but the use of transgenic plants in molecular farming represents a novel source of molecular medicines that include plasma proteins, enzymes, growth factors, vaccines and recombinant antibodies. Until recently, the wide use of these molecular medicines was limited because of the difficulty in producing these proteins outside animals or animal cell cultures. The application of molecular biology and plant biotechnology in the 1990s showed that many molecular medicines could be synthesised in plants. The goal of this Molecular Farming technology is to produce pharmaceuticals that are safer, easier to produce and less expensive than those produced in animals or microbial cultures. Here, we examine the production of recombinant antibodies by Molecular Farming.     

Wheat puroindolines enhance fungal disease resistance in transgenic rice

Antimicrobial peptides play a role in the immune systems of animals and plants by limiting pathogen infection and growth. The puroindolines, endosperm-specific proteins involved in wheat seed hardness, are small proteins reported to have in vitro antimicrobial properties. Rice, the most widely used cereal crop worldwide, normally does not contain puroindolines. Transgenic rice plants that constitutively express the puroindoline genes pinA and/or pinB throughout the plants were produced. PIN extracts of leaves from the transgenic plants reduced in vitro growth of Magnaporthe grisea and Rhizoctonia solani, two major fungal pathogens of rice, by 35 to 50%. Transgenic rice expressing pinA and/or pinB showed significantly increased tolerance to M. grisea (rice blast), with a 29 to 54% reduction in symptoms, and R. solani (sheath blight), with an 11 to 22% reduction in symptoms. Puroindolines are effective in vivo in antifungal proteins and could be valuable new tools in the control of a wide range of fungal pathogens of crop plants.     

Gene atlas of iron-containing proteins in Arabidopsis thaliana

Iron (Fe) is an essential element for the development and physiology of plants, owing to its presence in numerous proteins involved in central biological processes. Here, we established an exhaustive, manually curated inventory of genes encoding Fe-containing proteins in Arabidopsis thaliana, and summarized their subcellular localization, spatiotemporal expression and evolutionary age. We have currently identified 1068 genes encoding potential Fe-containing proteins, including 204 iron-sulfur (Fe-S) proteins, 446 haem proteins and 330 non-Fe-S/non-haem Fe proteins (updates of this atlas are available at https://conf.arabidopsis.org/display/COM/Atlas+of+Fe+containing+proteins ). A fourth class, containing 88 genes for which iron binding is uncertain, is indexed as ‘unclear’. The proteins are distributed in diverse subcellular compartments with strong differences per category. Interestingly, analysis of the gene age index showed that most genes were acquired early in plant evolutionary history and have progressively gained regulatory elements, to support the complex organ-specific and development-specific functions necessitated by the emergence of terrestrial plants. With this gene atlas, we provide a valuable and updateable tool for the research community that supports the characterization of the molecular actors and mechanisms important for Fe metabolism in plants. This will also help in selecting relevant targets for breeding or biotechnological approaches aiming at Fe biofortification in crops.     

Induction of protein body formation in plant leaves by elastin-like polypeptide fusions

Background  

Elastin-like polypeptides are synthetic biopolymers composed of a repeating pentapeptide 'VPGXG' sequence that are valuable for the simple non-chromatographic purification of recombinant proteins. In addition, elastin-like polypeptide fusions have been shown to enhance the accumulation of a range of different recombinant proteins in plants, thus addressing the major limitation of plant-based expression systems, which is a low production yield. This study's main objectives were to determine the general utility of elastin-like polypeptide protein fusions in various intracellular compartments and to elucidate elastin-like polypeptide's mechanism of action for increasing recombinant protein accumulation in the endoplasmic reticulum of plants.     

Nuclear and plastid genetic engineering of plants: Comparison of opportunities and challenges

Plant genetic engineering is one of the key technologies for crop improvement as well as an emerging approach for producing recombinant proteins in plants. Both plant nuclear and plastid genomes can be genetically modified, yet fundamental functional differences between the eukaryotic genome of the plant cell nucleus and the prokaryotic-like genome of the plastid will have an impact on key characteristics of the resulting transgenic organism. So, which genome, nuclear or plastid, to transform for the desired transgenic phenotype? In this review we compare the advantages and drawbacks of engineering plant nuclear and plastid genomes to generate transgenic plants with the traits of interest, and evaluate the pros and cons of their use for different biotechnology and basic research applications, ranging from generation of commercial crops with valuable new phenotypes to ‘bioreactor’ plants for large-scale production of recombinant proteins to research model plants expressing various reporter proteins.     

The M4 insulator,the TM2 matrix attachment region,and the double copy of the heavy chain gene contribute to the enhanced accumulation of the PHB-01 antibody in tobacco plants

Transgenic Research - The expression of recombinant proteins in plants is a valuable alternative to bioreactors using mammalian cell systems. Ease of scaling, and their inability to host human...