ABSTRACT
Plants and animals have been bred for thousands of years to
obtain species with more desirable traits. More recently,
plants and animals have been engineered to contain valu-
able output traits as well. That is, they can be manipulated
to produce proteins that add value by enabling the protein
to be recovered from the host and sold as an industrial
enzyme or therapeutic. Heterologous protein production
in transgenic plant and animals provides for a low-cost
production system that is easily scaled up or down depend-
ing on demand. The use of transgenic plant and animal
expression systems is gaining momentum as advances are
made in generating high expression levels within these
hosts. A number of strategies exist for achieving stable
and transient expression in both plant and animal hosts.
Recent reviews detail technologies used for transgenic
plant expression[1-3] and transgenic animal expression.[4]
As advances continue to result in increased expression
levels for recombinant proteins, efficient recovery and
purification of these commodities will be important in
realizing the low-cost potential offered by these expression
systems. The following sections present the strategies com-
monly used to isolate and purify recombinant proteins from
various plant and animal host systems.
