Biomolecular Farming System for Industrial, Pharmaceutical and Other Non-food Plant Products

Although laboratory-scale advances in molecular and genetic engineering bring the promise of one day utilizing plants to produce human therapeutic proteins (such as insulin) there is a concomitant requirement for technological advances in plant biomass production that will convey the future products of plant molecular engineering to the marketplace in a safe, secure, reliable and economically feasible manner. The proposed work will determine the feasibility of combining a) existing state of the art controlled environment agriculture (CEA) techniques to produce large quantities of biomass with b) optimization of the environmental growth parameters to increase yield and uniformity of a specific protein in a transgenic plant, namely Green Fluorescent Protein from transgenic tobacco as a model system.