TRANSGENIC LYCOPERSICUM ESCULENTUM MILL (TOMATO) PLANT AS BIOREACTOR FOR THE PRODUCTION OF HUMAN NEUTROPHIL PEPTIDE-1 (HNP-1): A USEFUL PROTEIN BASED PHARMACEUTICAL

The term ‘transgenic plant’ is defined as the plants that are produced in the lab by artificial insertion of genes sometimes from the same species and sometimes entirely from the different kingdom. A major advantage of transgenic plant because of which it gains a lot of importance in today’s world is developing it for producing pharmaceutically useful compounds. Hence, they are acting as a natural bioreactor for producing therapeutic proteins and peptides in large amount. The present work deals with the investigation of producing a Human Neutrophil Peptide-1 (HNP-1) which is an antimicrobial peptide and commonly known as Defensin in Lycopersicum esculentum Mill. plant by Agrobacterium tumefaciens mediated genetic transformation technique. The cloning of HNP-1 was successfully done in a plant expression vector ‘pGreenI 0029 with 35S CaMV promoter’ by authors and described earlier. In this work we would like to describe transformation of pGreenI 0029 with HNP-1 gene and 35S CaMV promoter, inside Agrobacteium tumefaciens cells and then genetic transformation of Lycopersicum esculentum Mill.plant via recombinant Agrobacteium tumefaciens by seed cotyledon method. The transgenic tomato plants were screened for the presence of HNP-1 gene. The isolated total soluble proteins from tomato leaves were subjected for in vitro antimicrobial activity and showed antimicrobial activity against various pathogenic microorganisms like S. aureus, B. subtillis, E. coli and Candida albicans.