Recombinant proteins expressed in lettuce

Abstract

Plant expression system has been firmly attracting researcher’s attention in the past two decades and many kinds of plants were employed to express various recombinant proteins. Among those plants, lettuce has been used as a promising expression host for heterologous recombinant proteins due to its advantage of oral delivery without heating process, besides other general superiorities of plant-based expression system. Many transgenic researches on lettuce have been reported and various products have been expressed successfully in lettuce, including vaccine antigens, antibodies, bioactive peptides, therapeutic proteins, industrial products and other interesting proteins. This paper reviews the current literatures on lettuce as expression platform for heterologous proteins, as well as underlying challenges in the future application.