Indeed, microalgae are an ideal candidate of protein bioreactor as it combines the ease of cultivation inherent to microorganisms and protein modification ability of plant cell. Recently, light has been shed on Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, a single-celled eukaryotic marine microalga for production of recombinant therapeutic proteins.
For decades, C. reinhardtii has been serving as a model organism for studying chloroplast and its functions, but immense biotechnological potentials of thiswell-known unicellular flagellate
were discovered recently.
It has been noticed that C. reinhardtii offers several advantages over other protein biosynthesizing systems employed today.
The ability to fold proteins correctly and assembling of more complex proteins easily has facilitated production of high quality proteins using C. reinhardtii at much lower cost. Interestingly, C. reinhardtii can be grown in any contaminantmediumwithout having a risk of contaminating the interested recombinant protein.