Combination of conditioned medium and elicitation enhances taxoid production in bioreactor cultures of Taxus chinensis cells

Abstract

Stimulating effects of conditioned medium (CM) addition and its combination with methyl jasmonate (MJA) elicitation on production of physiologically active taxuyunnanine C (TC) by cell cultures of Taxus chinensis were demonstrated in both a shake flask and a 1-l (working volume) concentric-tube airlift bioreactor. In control cell cultures, average cell growth rates were 0.117±0.003 per day in the flask and 0.086±0.001 per day in the airlift bioreactor. With addition of 50% (by volume) CM on day 0, an average growth rate of 0.153±0.006 per day in flask and 0.125±0.003 per day in bioreactor was obtained, and the maximum cell density (on day 11) was 15.0±0.1 g l −1 in flask and 15.5±0.8 g l −1 in bioreactor. TC production and productivity were 43.0±17.6 mg l −1 and 1.0±0.8 mg l −1 per day in bioreactor control cultures, and a much higher production of 78.9±20.6 mg l −1 and productivity of 4.5±1.2 mg l −1 per day were obtained in bioreactor cultures with CM addition. Combination of CM addition with MJA (at 100 μM) elicitation enhanced TC productivity in bioreactors by about 30% when compared with the cultures with only MJA elicitation, i.e., increased from 9.2±0.9 to 11.8±0.9 mg l −1 per day. The work is potentially beneficial to large-scale plant cell cultures for production of the bioactive secondary metabolite.