Abstract
Soybean is an attractive platform as a protein bioreactor for the industrial scale-up of recombinant proteins. It is the major global vegetable protein commodity widely used as animal feed and as a component of processed food. The industrial capability to grow and process soybeans to obtain the protein fraction is a well-developed turnkey technology. There is an immense potential to create new feed products that meet the nutritional needs for production animals by developing soybeans as a protein production platform. Modified feed soybeans could be immediately fed into existing production paths as part of deployable products. The same technology used to modify soybeans to produce new feed and food proteins can be leveraged to produce other industrial proteins, where there is an increasing need for large-scale low-cost production for end uses such as enzymes for biofuel and food/feed processing. Producing proteins in soybean has the further advantage that soy oil is a global commodity coproduct with sufficient value to subsidize the costs of protein production. While the production of proteins in soybean is based on standard biotechnology approaches that have been developed for other plant species, soybean possesses some possibly unique intrinsic advantages that separate it from other plant protein bioreactor platforms, enhancing the capacity of soybean to stably accumulate foreign proteins. This chapter reviews the current state of engineering soybeans for protein production and outlines both the technical and biological aspects of protein production, and emerging opportunities to meet the product needs of the future.
Original language | English (US) |
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Title of host publication | Recent Advancements in Gene Expression and Enabling Technologies in Crop Plants |
Publisher | Springer New York |
Pages | 193-212 |
Number of pages | 20 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 9781493922024 |
ISBN (Print) | 9781493922017 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Jan 1 2015 |
Keywords
- Plant biotechnology
- Protein bioreactors
- Seed protein
- Soybeans
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- General Agricultural and Biological Sciences
- General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology