Phenolics in root cultures of medicinal plants

Abstract

The major classes of useful compounds produced in the medicinal plants are—for example, alkaloids, saponins, lipids, phenolics, and so on. With the recent development of analytical methods, the chemical structures of phenolics, especially polyphenols such as tannins, whose chemistry has remained unsolved for a long time, have gradually been elucidated and tannins have been proved to possess several new important medicinal activities. Particularly, the importance of tannins as virustatic pharmaceuticals is continuously increasing. Many approaches for the production of useful secondary metabolites by plant tissue cultures (cell and organ cultures) have been developed and have led, in several plants, to the production of the objective chemicals in large amounts (with higher contents compared to those of the intact plants). Most of these were alkaloids and terpenoids. Concerning the production of polyphenols by tissue culture methods, sufficient research has not been done except for some examples using cell suspension cultures.