Manipulation Of Plant Traits Suitable For Pharmaceutical Production In Plant Factory

Plant-made pharmaceuticals (PMP) offer a number of advantages over traditional systems. Producing pharmaceutical protein, such as antibodies and vaccines, using transgenic plants attracts attention, because of low cost, easy control of a production scale, and the low risk of contamination during a process of production. The research for oral immunization, called "a vaccine to eat", is intensity studied in Japan. Since PMP is used for medical therapy, it is desired to grow plants in closed cultivation room, called plant factory, where various environmental conditions are severely controlled for stable production of high quality and safety pharmaceuticals. However, cultivating plants in plant factory costs more than those growing in filed. Therefore, modification of plants traits suitable for cultivation in plant factory is necessary for the effective utilization of the limit space for plant growth to reduce cost for production of PMP. We show here that the transgenic tobacco plants that express the chimeric repressor for Arabidopsis ILI1 binding bHLH (AtIBH1) exhibit dwarf phenotype by reducing cell elongation and enable to grow 4-6 more number than wild type plant in same space without reducing exogenous protein productivity. Pro35S:AtIBH1SRDX transgenic tobacco could produce 2-4 fold exogenous proteins than that of wild type plants in the same space. We show that the AtIBH1SRDX gene can induce phenotype suitable for pharmaceutical material production in plant factory.