Analysis of Novel Food Proteins from Plants

In the past decades, significant advancement has been made in plant-based platforms for vaccine and pharmaceutical production. Various plant species, including tobacco, corn, potato, and others, have been engineered to produce a wide range of bioactives such as vaccines. Nowadays, with global changes challenging food security for humans, attention of researchers has moved to the use of plant as biotechnological systems for production of nutritious proteins for human nutrition, including animal proteins, that have higher biological values than those from other sources. Although plant-based platforms have considerable advantages over traditional systems such as bacterial and animal systems, there are several obstacles to commercial-scale production, first of all the purification process of the proteins from the expression systems and their structural characterization to ensure their safety and regulatory approval. In this chapter, the issues connected to the production of proteins in plant seeds and a pipeline for their isolation and analysis for proteomics characterization are detailed.