Life or Death switch in plants ER-stress: a novel metacaspase pathway

Plants are attractive platforms to express recombinant proteins of high value for applications in industrial biotechnology. High expression level of high-value proteins in tobacco leaves can lead to ER-stress, which can then lead to Programmed Cell Death (PCD) and therefore limit the yield of the recombinant protein of interest. Improving our understanding of ER-stress induction of PCD in plant is expected to allow the design of improved plant strain, for example an improved tobacco strain. The project will identify novel target genes that could be subjected to genome editing in order to disable PCD in protein-expression hosts and increase the yield of recombinant proteins to be used in biotech processes.