Production of plantibodies in Nicotiana plants.

Because of the wide use and high demand in medicine, monoclonal antibodies are among the main recombinant pharmaceuticals at present, although present limitations of the productive platforms for monoclonal antibodies are driving the improvement of the large-scale technologies and the development of alternative expression systems. This has drawn the attention on plants as expression system for monoclonal antibodies and related derivatives, owning the capacity of plants to properly express and process eukaryotic proteins with biological activity resembling that of the natural proteins. In this chapter, the procedures from the isolation of the monoclonal antibody genes to the biochemical and biological characterization of the plant-expressed monoclonal antibody are described.