molecular-farming
Molecular farming is the use of genetic engineering to introduce genes encoding valuable pharmaceuticals or industrial proteins into plants, turning them into living bioreactors for producing medicines, vaccines, and other biologics. This approach leverages plants' scalability, low production costs, and natural biosynthetic machinery, making them a compelling alternative to conventional cell-culture or fermentation systems. For plant scientists, it opens research into optimizing transgene expression, protein folding, glycosylation, and subcellular targeting within plant tissues.
open_in_new WikipediaPubMed · 2026-04-01
Scientists engineered tobacco plants to produce protein nanoparticles carrying Salmonella antigens — a step toward plant-made vaccines that could protect poultry flocks from the bacteria responsible for most Salmonella food poisoning in humans.
Five different versions of the Salmonella-antigen fusion protein were successfully produced in tobacco plant leaves, targeting either chloroplasts or the cell cytosol.
Chloroplast-targeted versions accumulated at levels exceeding 0.7 mg per gram of fresh leaf tissue — the highest yield achieved in the study.
The fusion proteins self-assembled into mosaic nanoparticles, meaning the plant-produced components can spontaneously form the multi-antigen structures needed for vaccine activity.
