Plants offer a number of attractive benefits over conventional mammalian
or bacterial cell culture systems for the production of valuable
pharmaceutical and industrial proteins. Currently, antibodies and their
derived fragments represent the largest and most important group of
biotechnological products in clinical trials. In particular,
single-chain antibodies are an interesting class of biopharmaceuticals
because they are able to overcome specific problems associated with
full-length antibodies. Another valuable antibody format is the scFv-Fc:
fusion of the Fc domain to a single-chain variable fragment restores
antibody effector functions, allows purification, and mimicks, despite
being a ‘single-gene’ product, the bivalent properties of a full-length
IgG. Although many different plant-based production platforms have been
evaluated for antibody production, seeds are especially attractive
because, as natural storage organs, they provide an optimal biochemical
environment for the accumulation and long-term storage of large amounts
of functional proteins. This chapter describes how to achieve high-level
seed-specific expression of antibody fragments, how to select the best
transgenic lines, and how to evaluate the accumulation level in the seed
stocks from the selected lines.