This is an interesting idea, however I think the production of Antimicrobial peptides would be economical and higher using engineered microbes than in plants. There are many such examples wherein the secondary metabolites/ compounds of interest are produced using bacterial systems instead of plants.

Linear antimicrobial peptides containing L-amino acids can be produced in plants as biofactories (different species) as it has been done with other small proteins (e.g. insulin, certain microbial or viral antigens, truncated glutelins, etc). Yields can be even higher tham with Ecoli or yeast , and more important, cheaper. The only problem is public acceptance of GMO plants, as happen in Europe. For examples see Ventria, Sembiosys or AMPbiotech web pages.

Thanks for the replies, very interesting that plant production can be cheaper, are there publications discussing yield and cost in bacterial vs plant production systems?

In the article "Exploring the Potential of Pharmacological Promiscuous Host-Defense Peptides: From Natural to biotechnological Applications Screenings", in the topic "Large-Scale HDP Production: Overcoming a Main Problem", I do a little discussion about your questio.

i do think this topic is very intersting, I have a question that the AMP alaways composed less than 50 AA, why not synthesis it all, because purification step from bacteria or plants more expensive.

Look forward to reading your paper Osmar.

Currently the cost of the synthesis of 1-5 mg of a peptide of medium lenght (e.g. cecropin A) using standard solid phase methods is higher than 500€, depending on the dealer. Of course this can be reduced upon production of large quantities, but not less than 10 times (I think, is there any peptide chemist that can confirm this?). Thus, for current therapy (human or plant infectious diseases) this is not feasible (too expensive). So, there is a need to search for cheaper methods of production if we like to bring AMPs to the market. This is the reason for microbial and plant biofactories

Respected sir,

Yes AMPs can be produced in plants and I have done project on the same. there are some medicinal plants mentioned in the literature the extracts of the same can be used for AMP production.

Sir I have done project on both production of AMP from bacterial origin as well as from plant origin and found that production of AMP from plant is too cheap than in bacteria because down streaming process are simple in case of plant origin

Thanks Pratik, I also had a small project looking for natural antimicrobial peptides in plants. Is this an interesting source of new peptides? Most peptides in the literature come from other organisms. I have a very sensitive bacterial reporter system that can tell me if there are sub lethal peptide activities in plant extracts. I have used it to find activity in extracts, and in those positive samples, I can see proteins on gels of the expected size. I have been hoping to purify and sequence these peptides but have not had the resources to follow through on this.

I have recently co-authired a few papers on production of synthetic AMPs using rice as biofactories in BMC plant Biol., Plant Biotech. Journal and PLOSone that illustrate the potential of plants.