Document Type : Review Article
Authors
1
Plant Genetic Engineering Laboratory, Department of Biotechnology, Bharathiar University, Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, India
2
Department of Biotechnology, Karpagam Academy of Higher Education, Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, India
3
Centre for Natural Products and Functional Foods, Karpagam Academy of Higher Education, Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, India
4
Department of Biotechnology, PSGR Krishnammal College for Women, Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, India
Abstract
The demand for enzymes continues to rise across various industrial sectors, including biofuels, paper, textiles, food, and environmental remediation. Although conventional microbial and mammalian cell-based production platforms have shown promise for producing industrially important enzymes, they are often associated with sustainability challenges such as high costs, biosafety concerns, and complex purification steps. Consequently, plants have been investigated as a feasible alternative for recombinant enzyme production in the development of sustainable systems. Moreover, compared with traditional microbial and mammalian systems, plant-based platforms offer low-cost cultivation, scalability, and safety benefits. This review provides a comprehensive analysis of plant-based systems for enzyme production, highlighting commonly used host organisms, expression techniques, and the importance of genetic elements such as promoters, signal peptides, and expression vectors. It also focuses specifically on major classes of industrial enzymes that are efficiently produced in plants, including cell-wall-degrading enzymes, lignin-modifying enzymes, enzymes used in food and detergent production, and those employed in pharmaceutical and diagnostic applications. Finally, the review concludes by highlighting advances in synthetic biology and the advantages of transient expression strategies over transgenic methods for industrial enzyme production. Overall, this review aims to promote further research and commercial application toward more sustainable and efficient enzyme production approaches.
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