Acknowledging stress to increase protein production in plants
Besides being our main source of food and feed, plants can be used as flexible and sustainable platforms to produce large amounts of proteins for industry, such as pharmaceuticals and technical enzymes. For 30 years, the common strategy to improve protein manufacturing in plants is to optimize the gene of interest to adapt it to the plant protein synthesis machinery. However, increase in protein production following the codon optimization route in many cases still relies on a trial‐and‐error approach and has often led to unsatisfactory or inconsistent results.
We propose that this is because until now, it was not considered that high‐level protein production is stressful for the plant, and plants under stress behave differently. We hypothesize that the data on which the codon optimization algorithms are based might not reflect the actual situation in plants during the protein production process, and therefore can fail to result in the desired increase in protein production. This could be even more relevant in the context of transient expression in plants upon agroinfiltration, which is per se a biotic stress caused by bacterial infection. In this project, we set out to investigate whether there is a variation in (charged) tRNAs pools in response to the stress of infection and/or high protein accumulation in tobacco.
Timeline: 01/11/2022 - 31/10/2023
Contacts: Luisa Bortesi