Table 4.

Advantages and disadvantages of different hosts in recombinant human collagen expression and production.

Host	Advantages	Disadvantages	Collagen Types
Bacteria • Escherichia coli [265,266]	• Inexpensive • Scalable • Well-characterized	• Poor transformation efficiency of long plasmids • No native enzyme for post-translational modification	III [265,266]
Yeast • Saccharomyces cerevisiae [267–270] • Pichia pastoris [271–274]	• Low maintenance cost • Well-characterized	• No native enzyme for post-translational modification	I [267,270,271] II [272] III [268,269,273,274]
Plants • Tobacco [275–277] • Maize [278]	• Good transformation efficiency of long plasmids • Native prolyl hydroxylase activity • Scalable	• Low native enzyme hydroxylation activity	I [275–278]
Mammalian cells • Chinese hamster ovary cells [279] • HeLa cells [280] • human embryonic kidney 293 cells [281–283] • Fibrosarcoma HT 1080 cells [283–285]	• Simple cloning schemes • High cloning efficiency • Native hydroxylase and lysine glycosylase activity	• Poor yield • Costly to culture • Long production times	I [284] II [285] IV [279] V [281] VII [282] X [283] XII [280]
Insects • Spodoptera frugiperda Sf9 cells [286–290] • Drosophila melanogaster S2 fly cells [291] • Bombyx mori silkworms [290,292,293] and silkworm cells [290]	• Established transfection protocols • High density culture for scale-up • Cheaper scale-up than mammalian cells • Native hydroxylase activity	• Low native enzyme hydroxylation activity	I [286,292] II [290] III [287,288,293] IX [289] XXI [291]