The Preliminary Exploration Of Transgenic Tomato As Plant Bioreactor

Many of our 'small-molecule-drugs' are natural products from plants, or are syntheticcompounds based on molecules found naturally in plants. Plants have been used for thousandsof years to prevent and cure diseases in this way. So far the vast majority of the proteintherapeutics (or biopharmaceuticals) we use are from animal or human sources, and areproduced commercially in microbial or mammalian bioreactor systems. However, only in thelast 15 years has the plant genome been manipulated for the purpose of producing therapeuticmolecules. Compared to other bioreactor systems, plants allow the cost-effective productionof recombinant proteins on an agricultural scale, while eliminating risks of productcontamination with endotoxins or human pathogens. Another advantage of the use of plants inrecombinant protein production is that vaccine candidates can be expressed in edible plantorgans, allowing them to be administered as unprocessed or partially processed materials. As a member of the super-family, human acidic fibroblast growth factor (aFGF or FGF1),expressed by a variety of cells from all three germ layers, shows a great potential for clinicaltherapy of a variety of diseases, such as Parkinson's disease, spinal cord contusion injury,neural regeneration in reimplantation of broken-off finger, brain ischemia, renal ischemia,myocardial infarction, occlusive vascularitis, retinal ischemia, gastric ulcer and nonhealingwound and so on. To meet the increasing demand of this expensive cytokine and plant bioreactor has somany advantages, we explored the expression of aFGF in transgenic tomato. We constructed abinary vector carrying a modified human aFGF gene and a manA gene that allowed the use ofPMI selection system, an antibiotic and herbicide-free system, during the transformationprocess. We produced the transgenic tomato plants by an Agrobacterium tumefacien-mediatedmethod. Southern hybridization and RT-PCR revealed the integration of aFGF gene in plantgenome and its successful transcription in transgenic plant cells.