The Use of Plants as Biofactories to Produce Recombinant Proteins
A special issue of Plants (ISSN 2223-7747). This special issue belongs to the section "Plant Genetics, Genomics and Biotechnology".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 20 March 2026 | Viewed by 42
Special Issue Editors
Interests: plant and microbial genomics; metagenomics; recombinant vaccines; nanobiotechnology; expression of recombinant proteins in plants; plant viruses
2. Department of Plant Physiology and Molecular Biology, University of Plovdiv, 4000 Plovdiv, Bulgaria
Interests: emerging viruses; vaccine design; antivirals; plant molecular farming; recombinant proteins; plant biotechnology
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
We are pleased to invite you to submit short communications, research, or review articles to the Special Issue titled “The Use of Plants as Biofactories to Produce Recombinant Proteins”.
Various expression systems can be used to produce recombinant proteins—bacteria, yeast, plants, or insect or animal cells. Of these systems, plant “biofactories” have a number of advantages for the production of recombinant proteins for biomedical purposes, including ease of manipulation, high speed and low cost of plant cultivation, ease of scaling up, the presence of post-translational modifications characteristic of higher eukaryotes, and the absence of common pathogens in animals and plants, which makes proteins obtained in plants safe. Transgenic plants can be used to produce recombinant proteins, providing stable but typically low expression levels. An alternative is the use of transient expression achieved by transferring genes into plant cells using Agrobacterium infection. Transient expression allows the desired protein to be produced within weeks, which is especially important for vaccine development during epidemics, for instance. Over the past twenty years, various recombinant proteins have been successfully obtained in plants, including vaccines, antibodies, diagnostic, and therapeutic proteins. Therefore, this Special Issue collects the latest findings and achievements in the development of new methods for the expression of recombinant proteins in plants, as well as the production and characterization of various proteins, primarily for biomedical purposes.
Dr. Nikolai V. Ravin
Dr. Gergana Zahmanova
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.
Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Plants is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.
Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.
Keywords
- plant
- biofactory
- recombinant protein
- expression
- vaccine
- monoclonal antibodies
- diagnostic and therapeutic proteins
- virus-like particles
- plant glycoengineering
- CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing
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