Abstract
Bioactive substances (BAS) of plant origin are known to play a very important role in modern medicine. Their use, however, is often limited by availability of plant resources and may jeopardize rare species of medicinal plants. Plant cell cultures can serve as a renewable source of valuable secondary metabolites. To the date, however, only few examples of their commercial use are known. The main reasons for such a situation are the insufficient production of secondary metabolites and high cultivation costs. It is possible to increase the performance of plant cell cultures by one or two orders of magnitude using traditional methods, such as selection of highly productive strains, optimization of the medium composition, elicitation, and addition of precursors of secondary metabolite biosynthesis. The progress in molecular biology methods brought about the advent of new means for increasing of the productivity of cell cultures based on the methods of metabolic engineering. Thus, overexpression of genes encoding the enzymes involved in the synthesis of the target product or, by contrast, repression of these genes significantly influences the cell biosynthetic capacity in vitro. Nevertheless, the attempts of the production of many secondary metabolites in plant cell culture were unsuccessful so far, probably due to the peculiarities of the cell culture as an artificial population of plant somatic cells. The use of plant organ culture or transformed roots (hairy root) could turn to be a considerably more efficient solution for this problem. The production of plant-derived secondary metabolites in yeast or bacteria transformed with plant genes is being studied currently. Although the attempts to use metabolic engineering methods were not particularly successful so far, new insights in biochemistry and physiology of secondary metabolism, particularly in regulation and compartmentation of secondary metabolite synthesis as well as mechanisms of their transport and storage make these approaches promising.
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Disclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.