Production of high valued medicinal compounds using plant cell tissue and organ culture

Abstract

Today market demand for natural products is high and the conventional practices to get the herbs from wild nature or cultivated fields are not sufficiently efficient to meet the demand. Alternative approaches such as plant tissue organ and cell cultures (PTOC) are believed to be promising and inexpensive methods. The PTOC approach offers the opportunity to sustain the standardized natural products of uniform quality and ensures to be free of agrochemicals, toxins or other environmental pollutants. Number of studies using in vitro tissue culture approaches have extensively been studied and adopted for uniform and continuous supply of natural products. There are companies taking advantages of this technology, which offers the opportunity to produce medicinal compounds continuously and in a imited space rather than cultivating on hectares of land. Despite these advantages the PTOC system needs optimization and there are factors regulating plant cell machinery to process primary metabolites for the secondary metabolites (medicinal compounds) production. These factors are plant growth regulators (PGRs), substrate type and concentration, light condition, elicitors and precursors feeding. Additionally, the bioreactor design also plays important role to ensure the large scale production using plant cells and organs cultures.