From medicinal plants to medicines in plants: Plant factories for the production of valuable pharmaceuticals

摘要

Plants have been used since antiquity as a source of medicines, and even today many of our drugs are natural products from plants or are based on such products. Now genetic engineering in plants is a mainstream technology, we can take advantage of the metabolic capabilities of plants by using them as factories to produce natural pharmacologically-active compounds in greater amounts than occur in nature, or to produce novel compounds by extending endogenous metabolic pathways or harnessing the protein synthesis machinery to produce recombinant human proteins that are currently manufactured at great expense by fermentation in mammalian cells.