Chloroplast Engineering: Boon For Third-world Countries As Therapeutic Proteins

Chloroplasts are the site of photosynthesis in plants mostly seen in leaves and some eukaryotic algae that provides the primary sources of the world’s food productivity. Plastids of higher plants are generally semiautonomous with a ~120–150 kb genome. Chloroplast transformation has become an attractive alternative to nuclear gene transformation due to its advantages, high protein levels, the feasibility of expressing multiple proteins from polycistronic mRNAs, and gene containment through the lack of pollen transmission. The review presents the recent trends and methods for plastid genome engineering and transgene expression and summarizes the potential of plastid transformation in various fields of biotechnology and also as a source of therapeutic proteins.