Quality assessment of recombinant proteins produced in plants

Plant-based expression technologies for recombinant proteins have begun to receive acceptance for pharmaceuticals and other commercial markets. Protein products derived from plants offer safer, more cost-effective, and less capital-intensive alternatives to traditional manufacturing systems using microbial fermentation or animal cell culture bioreactors. Moreover, plants are now known to be capable of expressing bioactive proteins from a diverse array of species including animals and humans. Methods development to assess the quality and performance of proteins manufactured in plants are essential to support the QA/QC demands as plant-produced protein products transition to the commercial marketplace. Within the pharmaceutical arena, process validation and acceptance criteria for biological products must comply with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and ICH Q6B guidelines in order to initiate the regulatory approval process. Detailed product specifications will also need to be developed and validated for plant-made proteins for the bioenergy, food, chemical synthesis, or research reagent markets.We have, therefore, developed assessment methods for important qualitative and quantitative parameters of the products and the manufacturing methods utilized in plant-based production systems. In this chapter, we describe a number of procedures to validate product identity and characteristics including mass analyses, antibody cross-reactivity, N-terminal sequencing, and bioactivity. We also address methods for routine assessment of yield, recovery, and purity. The methods presented are those developed for the synthesis and recovery of the avian cytokine, chicken interleukin-12 (ChIL-12), produced in the leaves of Nicotiana benthamiana. The ChIL-12 protein used as a model for this chapter includes a C-terminal histidine epitope (HIS-tag) and, thus, these methods may be directly applicable to other HIS-tagged proteins produced in plants. However, the overall strategy presented using the ChIL-12(HIS) example should provide the basis of standard procedures for assessing the quality of other plant-based protein products and manufacturing systems.