Bioreactor technology for sustainable production of plant cell-derived products

The successful cultivation of plant cell and tissue cultures for the production of valuable chemical components requires the selection of an appropriate bioreactor. Selection criteria are determined based on a number of factors that are intrinsic to particular plant cell or tissue cultures and are influenced by the process objectives. Due to the specific properties of plant cell and tissue cultures, bioreactor systems may differ significantly from those used for microorganism or animal cell cultures. Furthermore, the differences from one plant culture to another can be immense; it is obvious that the optimal bioreactor system for a plant suspension cell culture is different to one for a plant tissue culture in many ways. General considerations are presented, and based on these key points, selection criteria are used to establish a “bioreactor chooser” tool. The particular details of the most relevant bioreactor types for plant cell and tissue cultures are listed and described. To produce valuable products, the process also needs to be scaled up to an economically justifiable size, which is usually done either by scaling up the size of the bioreactor itself or by bioreactor parallelization. Therefore, the most significant influencing factors are also discussed