XVI International Botanical Congess

Plant roots hold a large potential for bio-manufacturing and new lead discovery. Chemical and physical treatments, which mimic various stresses encountered by a plant, stimulate roots to produce and exude arrays of new compounds. These elicited compounds may include valuable natural products and new pharmaceuticals. Plant roots can also be engineered to produce and continuously secrete several heterologous recombinant proteins. The yield of a recombinant protein produced via this so-called rhizosecretion technology may, over time may, exceed the weight of the plant producing it. The purification of proteins produced via rhizosecretion is a relatively simple task compared to tissue extraction methods.