Production, Sorting, and Accumulation of Proteins and Metabolites within Plant Cells

Dear Colleagues,

The use of plants as biofactories for the production of natural compounds has a long tradition and is today attracting new attention for a higher awareness of the value of plant biomasses in a circular economy. Moreover, in recent years, plant-based bioproduction platforms have emerged as promising strategies to produce recombinant proteins, offering very low production costs and unbeatable scalability. The production of recombinant pharmaceutical proteins is a hot topic in biotechnology as plants are clearly an advantageous expression system when compared with their more commonly used microbial and mammalian cell-culture-based counterparts, offering much lower production costs, low risk of human and animal pathogen contaminations, and unbeatable scalability.

Membrane trafficking carries out transport of all the molecules of possible interest, from their synthesis to accumulation, and requires the coordination of multiple signaling events and molecular motors to control cargo sorting. A better understanding of the secretory pathway in plants can drive improvements in food production and plant-based products with medicinal, nutritional, and commercial value. Moreover, the complex endomembrane system ensures metabolite compartmentalization and stability. The secretory pathway of plants is perfect for both producing proteins that undergo complex post-translational modifications to become pharmacologically functional and directing the foreign protein to a particular subcellular compartment for further purification or storage.

This Special Issue offers a unique opportunity to bring together information for an up-to-date approach to molecular biology and biotechnology, where the biological system is optimized for the production or accumulation of high-value products. At the same time, it will have a great impact in the endomembrane trafficking community as it aims to explore an open problem with constant new updates given the number of new mechanisms, effectors, and pathways being disclosed today.

Prof. Dr. Gian-Pietro Di Sansebastiano
Dr. Cláudia Sofia Pereira
Guest Editors

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• endomembrane system
• protein sorting
• plant metabolites
• biotechnology
• natural products accumulation
• secondary metabolism
• compartmentalization
• bioproduction