43 Scientific Paper on the Topic

Overview

One paper written by Oded Shoseyov focuses on the collagen example he gave during his talk. The paper is titled “Human Recombinant Type I Collagen Produced in Plants”. This paper talks more in detail about how and why they were able to produce human collagen within a tobacco plant. Collagen is of great interest as a biomaterial, and has the potential to have healing properties. Typically it was sourced from other dead animals, but there are concerns with allergies or immune responses, and the collagen must endure a significant amount of cleaning and sterilization before it could be used, damaging the structural integrity of the material. By producing “new” collagen that does not come from animal sources, some of these issues can be avoided. The team used the previously identified human collagen DNA codes and essentially used the plants as bioreactors. The plants then express the gene, producing human Type 1 collagen which can then be extracted from the plant. This process is shown in the diagram below.

Figure 6: Process of extracting collagen from Tobacco Plants. Image Source: Dr. Shoseyov’s Paper

Citations

Shoseyov, O., Posen, Y., & Grynspan, F. (2013). Human Recombinant Type I Collagen Produced in Plants.
Tissue Engineering Part A, 19(13–14), 1527–1533. https://doi.org/10.1089/ten.tea.2012.0347