Physcomitrella patens: a non-vascular plant for recombinant protein production.

The moss Physcomitrella patens is a long-standing model for studying plant development, growth and cell differentiation in particular. Interest in this non-vascular plant arose following the discovery that homologous recombination is an efficient process. P. patens is, therefore, a tool of choice not only to study gene function but also for recombinant protein production. This system has many attributes that are advantageous for molecular farming: protein production in cell suspension, the possibility of generating targeted knockout mutants for glycoengineering and quantitative optimization for protein production. In terms of technical advances, P. patens is one of the most up-to-date plant expression systems and is a promising alternative to animal cell factories for the production of therapeutic proteins with either simple or highly complex structures.