Preface -- Contributors -- 1. Molecular Farming in Plants: an Overview; Shengwu Ma, Aiming Wang -- 2. Production of Foreign Proteins in Transgenic Plants; Shengwu Ma -- 3. Molecular Farming Using Bioreactor-based Plant Cell Suspension Cultures for Recombinant Protein Production; Ting-Kuo Huang, Karen A. McDonald -- 4. Chloroplast-derived Therapeutic and Prophylactic Vaccines; James S. New, Donevan Westerveld, Henry Daniell -- 5. Seed Expression Systems for Molecular Farming; Allison R. Kermode -- 6. Algae: an Alternative to the Higher Plant System in Gene Farming; Christoph Griesbeck, Anna Kirchmayr -- 7. The Production of Vaccines and Therapeutic Antibodies in Plants; Richard M. Twyman, Stefan Schillberg, Rainer Fischer -- 8. Production of Industrial Proteins in Plants; Elizabeth E. Hood, Deborah Vicuna Requesens -- 9. Transient Expression Using Agro-infiltration and Its Applications in Molecular Farming; Rima Menassa, Adil Ahmad, Jussi Joensuu -- 10. Plant Virus-mediated Expression in Molecular Farming; Aiming Wang -- 11. Downstream Processing of Transgenic Plant Systems: Protein Recovery and Purification Strategies; Lisa R. Wilken, Zivko L. Nikolov -- 12. Biosafety of Molecular Farming in Genetically Modified Plants; Didier Breyer et al -- Index.

Since the first recombinant plant-derived pharmaceutical protein (PDP), i.e., human serum albumin, was produced in transgenic tobacco and potato plants in 1990, molecular farming in plants has emerged as a new subject of sciences. The plant system has the potential to provide virtually unlimited quantities of these bio-products at low costs, which is impossible for any other systems. plants have been vigorously tested for the production of numerous bio-products including vaccines, therapeutic proteins, industrial enzymes and proteins with other functions. The urgent demand from the rapidly growing market has also facilitated research & development in the downstream processing of plant-derived recombinant proteins. Various breakthroughs resulting from basic to practical research  have lead to the rapid advance of this subject. This book was written by international authorities and was anticipated to help biotechnologists, scholars, professors, teachers and students in the field with a comprehensive state-of-the-art of overview of the subject. The book consists of 12 chapters, elucidating the principles of molecular farming, summarizing the most recent advances, revealing current challenges and pointing out future research directions.