Plants as Bioreactor

Abstract

430-432Production of pharmaceutically useful plant secondary metabolites in vitro has various advantages compared to extraction of these compounds from plants grown in the field or collected in nature. Exact control of various environmental parameters ensures a reproducible quality of the material totally independent from climate, weather and pests that affect severely the quality of plant material grown in nature. Thus, much research has been done to establish plant cell and suspension cultures for metabolite production. However, undifferentiated cell cultures often do not produce the desired metabolites in considerable amounts or lose their production capacity over a period of time. In contrast, in vitro cultures of fully differentiated plant organs exhibit a high and reliable production capacity of plant secondary metabolites. Thus, special bioreactors working according to the temporary immersion principle have been designed for automated in vitro culture of fully differentiated plant organs. It has been demonstrated that shoots, roots as well as tubers can be grown successfully with high multiplication rates in these bioreactors. Moreover, it has been found that metabolite concentrations in these tissues are much higher compared to undifferentiated cell cultures. Control of in vitro environmental parameters such as medium supplements, light conditions, immersion frequencies and gas composition have been used successfully to modify the metabolite content of the produced plant biomass. This is a very promising strategy for production of pharmaceutically active plant biomass in vitro