Hairy Root Culture: An Experimental System for Secondary Metabolite Production

Abstract

Mankind is totally dependent on plants for pharmaceuticals, agrochemicals, food additives, flavor and fragrance etc. Plants contain secondary metabolites having medicinal values. Secondary metabolites are biosynthetically derived from primary metabolites but are distributed in the limited amount and are valued at several thousand dollars per pound. Plant tissue culture technology is an important tool for production of the plant natural products via. micropropagation, cell culture, scaled up bioreactors and many more. One such tool is transformed root cultures also called as hairy root culture (HRC). It have productive capacity similar to the plants from which they have been initiated and they maintain the stability of growth and secondary metabolite production in successive generation. HRC is beneficial for root derived compounds. The revolutionized products obtained using HRC are Atropine, Diosgenin, Emetine, Quinine, Nicotine, Vincristine, Vinblastine, Glycerrhizin, Anthraquinones Shikonin and many more medicinally active ingredients which are in demand in the pharmaceutical industries. The production of HRC involves 3 steps viz., root induction, decontamination of roots and establishing liquid medium. The induction of hairy roots are done by genetic inseration of T-DNA of R-Plasmid, lodge in Agrobacterium rhizogenes into wounded tissue and proliferates, causing the growth of very fine adventitious roots. Hairy roots are genetically stable and have features similar to that of the normal roots. Thus, HRC provides promising approach to the biotechnological exploitation of plant cell culture for fine chemical production commercially.