A synthetic expression system for orthogonal gene expression in Nicotiana benthamiana.
Mojzita D, Rantasalo A, Laurel M, Hotti H, Oksman-Caldentey KM
Crop Improvement
Medicines like VEGF, used in treating eye disease and wound healing, could soon be grown directly in greenhouse plants instead of fermented in expensive industrial vats — cutting production costs and potentially making biologics more accessible.
Scientists created a new genetic switch that tells plants exactly how much of a desired protein to make. Unlike the old standard switch, this new one is louder, more stable, and harder for the plant's own defenses to shut off. They tested it by having tobacco plants produce everything from a glowing red protein to a human growth factor used in medicine — and it worked well every time.
Key Findings
The synthetic expression system (SES) produced higher and more stable RNA transcript levels than the widely used CaMV 35S promoter in all tested conditions
SES functioned without needing p19, a helper protein typically required to prevent plant immune silencing of foreign genes in transient expression experiments
SES successfully drove high-level accumulation of four distinct proteins — mCherry, glucose oxidase, protein A, and human VEGF165 — and remained functional in both plant and fungal hosts
chevron_right Technical Summary
Researchers built a synthetic genetic 'volume knob' for plants that controls how much of any target protein a plant produces — and it outperforms the industry-standard tool, the CaMV 35S promoter, in both strength and consistency.
Abstract Preview
Plants represent commercially relevant production systems for recombinant proteins and chemical compounds. Effective genetic engineering depends on precise control of heterologous gene expression, ...
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Tobacco is the common name of several plants in the genus Nicotiana of the family Solanaceae, and the general term for any product prepared from the cured leaves of these plants. Seventy-nine species of tobacco are known, but the chief commercial crop is N. tabacum. The more potent variant N. rus...