Elicitation, A Mechanistic Approach to Change the Metabolic Pathway of Plants to Produce Pharmacological Important Compounds in In-vitro Cell Cultures

Abstract

Plant’s secondary metabolites, produced usually under stress, are one of the promising sources for food additives, pharmaceuticals, food flavors and other industrial materials. The comprehensive probing of metabolite’s production mechanism, stress signal transduction pathway, would be great push toward in commercial production. Higher plants inevitably encounter stresses and sustain themselves by producing various secondary metabolites which, the secondary metabolites, have various industrial application that’s why are promising candidates for commercialization. Due to certain limitations of natural plant extraction, plant cell/tissue culture is considered a best alternative way for in-vitro production of bioactive secondary metabolites. Elicitation can be employed to overcome the constraints of plant cell technology that retard the process of commercialization. A way to enhance the secondary metabolite’s production in plants is Elicitation. In which an exogeneous elicitor, biotic or abiotic, is exposed in growth medium to trigger the production of secondary metabolite. During this phenomenon, several defense/ non-defenses related genes, activated/ deactivated. Furthermore, transient phosphorylation or dephosphorylation of proteins, expression of enzymes occurs through which biosynthetic pathways of several secondary metabolites can be ascertained. Additionally, a push toward advancement of metabolic engineering and gene manipulation to increase the productivity of secondary metabolites can be gained through integration of proteomics, transcriptomics, and metabolomics with system biology.