Abstract
This paper presents an overview of the applications of plant biotechnology for industrialscale production of clonal plants, secondary metabolites and heterologous proteins. Clonal plants are produced at industrialscale tissue culture nurseries with tissue culture facilities, and these production systems have been scaled-up recently with the use of bioreactors. Plant biotechnology-based systems for production of secondary metabolites and/or heterologous proteins have been optimized in plants through various expression strategies. Recently, the production of secondary metabolites in large-scale bioreactors has been commercialized. Furthermore, heterologous proteins from various eukaryotic origins such as antigens, as well as those with vaccine value are expressed in plants. Studies on the production of a number of commercially interesting products currently being investigated are described.
