Production of Plant Secondary Metabolites by Using Biotechnological Tools

Abstract

Plants are a remarkable source of high-value secondary metabolites with applications in various domains. Plant cell and tissue culture techniques appear as environmentally friendly alternatives for the production of secondary metabolites when natural supply is limited or chemical synthesis is unviable. In this chapter, the main advantages of using plant cell and tissue culture techniques for the production of plant secondary metabolites are presented as well as the different biotechnological approaches available to improve their production. In addition, the production of anticancer compounds (camptothecin, podophyllotoxin, taxol, vinblastibe, and vincristine) and metabolites from Lamiaceae spp. (phenolics as rosmarinic acid) were selected as examples to be highlighted. The study reviewed shows that undifferentiated cells are the preferred culture system used for the production of high-value secondary metabolites in vitro although there are many examples reporting the production in differentiated tissues particularly in hairy roots. Efforts have been made to scale up the production, and several strategies have been successfully applied to increase the production yields at the laboratorial scale. Nevertheless, there are only few examples of plant secondary metabolites production at commercial level, and further in-depth studies are still required.

Improving Phenolic Total Content and Monoterpene in Mentha x piperita by Using Salicylic Acid or Methyl Jasmonate Combined with Rhizobacteria Inoculation

“…They are low molecular weight compounds that are very important in plant ecology because they are responsible for the processes of adaptation of plants to their environment. Given their diverse biological and physio-chemical properties, secondary metabolites are of great interest as unique sources for pharmaceuticals, food additives, oils, waxes, perfumes, flavoring agents, dyes, and many other commercially important materials [1][2][3].…”

“…As knowledge has grown of the biological functionalities of secondary metabolites, so too has the search for new biotechnological alternatives to improve the production of economically important secondary metabolite compounds [2,3,[14][15][16] with bioactive properties which can be used in agriculture as herbicides and pesticides, or as medicinal agents. Several strategies have been investigated to enhance the production of secondary metabolites from medicinal plants, including high-yielding cell line screening, media modification, elicitation, precursor feeding, large-scale cultivation systems, plant cell immobilization, hairy root culture, biotransformation, and others [17,18].…”

Ephedrine production from suspension cultures of Ephedra alata L. callus

“…The advantage of this method is that it can ultimately provide a continuous, reliable source of natural products, thus avoiding the limited availability and complexity of chemical synthesis or extraction from whole plants. Suspension culture has been effectively utilized commercially for the production of valuable secondary metabolites such as taxol, resveratrol, naphtodianthrones, total phenolics, flavonoids, anthocyanins, artemisinin, ginsenosides, and ajmalicine (Xu et al, 2011;Gadzovska et al, 2015;Gonçalves and Romano, 2018). In recent years, suspension culture is viewed as an alternative to traditional agriculture for the industrial production of plant secondary metabolites (Yue et al, 2014).…”

“…Because of such high specificities of actions, the failure of one elicitor does not necessarily mean that the metabolic pathway cannot be triggered, thus indicating that a large number of elicitors need to be screened for accomplishing effective elicitation process (Patel and Krishnamurthy, 2013). Gonçalves and Romano (2018) reported that the incomplete knowledge of the metabolic pathways of the biologically active compounds limits the success of scaling up their production. The authors emphasized that modern molecular biology techniques are needed to enhance the production of secondary metabolites by engineering their biosynthetic pathways in plant tissues, in addition to the use of new promising elicitors.…”

“…Plant cell and tissue cultures have been used for the production of various valuable phytochemicals, including important alkaloids. They provide a pure continuous source of secondary metabolites independent of geographical or climatic conditions and within a short time period as compared to the extraction from wild plants (Gonçalves and Romano, 2018). In vitro culture systems act as an alternative method for the production of secondary metabolites, thereby conserving the natural sources (Ahmad et al, 2013).…”