ABSTRACT
Plants have evolved a vast chemical cornucopia to support their sessile lifestyles. Man has exploited this natural resource since Neolithic times and currently plant-derived chemicals are exploited for a myriad of applications. However, plant sources of most high-value natural products (NPs) are not domesticated and therefore their production cannot be undertaken on an agricultural scale. Further, these plant species are often slow growing, their populations limiting, the concentration of the target molecule highly variable and routinely present at extremely low concentrations. Plant cell and organ culture constitutes a sustainable, controllable and environmentally friendly tool for the industrial production of plant NPs. Further, advances in cell line selection, biotransformation, product secretion, cell permeabilisation, extraction and scale-up, among others, are driving increases in plant NP yields. However, there remain significant obstacles to the commercial synthesis of high-value chemicals from these sources. The relatively recent isolation, culturing and characterisation of cambial meristematic cells (CMCs), provides an emerging platform to circumvent many of these potential difficulties. [BMB Reports 2016; 49(3): 149-158].
Subject(s)
Biological Products/metabolism , Cell Culture Techniques/methods , Plant Cells/metabolism , Biotransformation , Cells, Immobilized/metabolism , Plant Roots/cytologyABSTRACT
Plant cell culture constitutes a sustainable, controllable and environmentally friendly tool to produce natural products for the pharmaceutical, cosmetic and industrial biotechnology industries. However, there are significant obstacles to the commercial synthesis of high value chemicals from plant culture including low yields, performance instability, slow plant cell growth, industrial scale-up and downstream processing. Cambial meristematic cells constitute a platform to ameliorate many of these potential problems enabling the commercial production of high value chemicals.
Subject(s)
Biological Products/isolation & purification , Biological Products/metabolism , Cambium/cytology , Cambium/physiology , Genetic Enhancement/methods , Ginsenosides/metabolism , Batch Cell Culture Techniques , Cells, Cultured , Ginsenosides/isolation & purificationABSTRACT
Plants are capable of producing a wide variety of secondary metabolites which have a diverse range of functions that can be exploited for medicinal purposes; for example, paclitaxel is a major anti-cancer drug found in the bark of Taxus spp. There are however supply issues as the compound is only found at low concentrations (0.05%) within the plant. The complex paclitaxel biosynthetic pathway makes chemical synthesis non-commercially viable; therefore alternative biotechnological sources have been explored for production including heterologous expression systems and plant cell culture.
