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REVIEW article

Front. Plant Sci.

Sec. Plant Biotechnology

Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpls.2025.1626856

This article is part of the Research TopicPlant-Based Production of Animal Proteins: Challenges and OpportunitiesView all 7 articles

The Challenges of Co-Extraction of Animal and Plant Proteins from Transgenic Plants for Use in Food and Feed

Provisionally accepted
  • 1North Carolina State University, Raleigh, United States
  • 2North Carolina State University, Raleigh, United, Raleigh, United States

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

Growing consumer awareness about health, environment, and animal welfare has pressured the food industry to be less reliant on animal proteins consumed as a whole product or formulated into a variety of foods. While recognizing the benefits of complete animal proteins, consumers are increasingly adding plant-based meat-, dairy-, seafood-, and egg-alternatives to diversify their diets. However, these alternatives still lack quality, flavor, and textural characteristics animal protein consumers are accustomed to. The challenges in producing affordable, sensorily acceptable plant-based protein products begin at harvest and in the initial extraction processes. This review highlights the current state-of-the-art in plant protein extraction and then relates these to potential challenges and opportunities in molecular farming wherein animal genes are inserted into plants to produce animal proteins. Plant protein quality is influenced by plant characteristics, environmental and climatic influences, harvesting, and the initial extraction steps. Many of these steps are well understood by actors across the food supply chain. As society begins preparing for large increases in protein demand over the next two decades, molecular farming has the potential to create novel protein offerings with higher nutritional quality, especially when the animal proteins are co-extracted with plant proteins, to meet consumer expectations. Bio-chemical/pharma industries have pursued animal protein extraction from transgenic plants for three decades, but efforts to produce food protein concentrates and isolates containing both animal and plant proteins are nascent, with most work accomplished in laboratories. We propose considerations to progress this technology from laboratories to commercial scale and highlight the importance of communication and education across the food supply chain, including regulators and policy makers, for acceptance and success of these novel products. There will undoubtedly be resistance, but perseverance to answer many questions needs to be recognized in preparation for meeting the rapid protein demand.

Keywords: protein, Molecular Farming, Muscle, Animal-based proteins, leaf proteins, protein concentrates and isolates, plant-based, extraction

Received: 11 May 2025; Accepted: 04 Aug 2025.

Copyright: © 2025 Aimutis and Shirwaiker. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence: William R Aimutis, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, United States

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.