Haematococcus as a promising cell factory to produce recombinant pharmaceutical proteins.

The need for recombinant pharmaceutical proteins has urged scientists all over the world to search for better protein expression systems which have higher capabilities and flexibilities. Although a number of protein expression systems are now available, no system is ideal and different systems lack specific properties. Here, microalga Haematococcus is discussed as a new protein expression system which merits cheap growth medium, fast growth rate, ease of manipulation and scale-up, ease of transformation, potential of exploiting in bioreactors and ability to exert post-translational modifications to the proteins. This green single-cell plant has favorable biological and biotechnological features for production of remarkable yields of recombinant proteins with high functionality. In this review article, we highlight the favorable biotechnological characteristics of Haematococcus for lowering costs and facilitating scale-up of recombinant protein production along with its superior biological features for genetic engineering.