Metabolic Engineering of Medicinal Plants and Microorganisms for the Production of Natural Products

Engineering Cell and Organ Cultures from Medicinal and Aromatic Plants Toward Commercial Production of Bioactive Metabolites

“…Plant metabolite engineering developed rapidly at the end of the last century based on the expanding knowledge on plant metabolic pathways and related genes and genomes data, as well as advances of transgenic research and "omics" technologies [18]. The strategies for plant metabolic engineering application were described in details in a number of publications, e.g., [1,4,[18][19][20], and in general include: The first choice of the strategy to be applied largely depends on the available information on the biosynthetic pathway and related genes involved in the biosynthesis of the target compound. Plant CHRC are generally a less complex subject for ME than the plant itself, which includes a large number of tissues and cell types often with complex pattern of development.…”

“…Medicinal and aromatic plants (MAP) produce a very wide range of secondary metabolites, presenting a rich and untapped source of bioactive compounds. Consumption of MAP-derived products is highly popular, and currently about 80% of the world's population use some herbal medicines for their healthcare needs [1,2]. This results in steady increase of the herbal market volumes, as recent estimation suggests the global herbal supplements and remedies market to reach US$ 115 billion by 2020 [3].…”

“…Moreover, some of the characterized MAP secondary metabolites have become a source of important lead compounds for new drug development. At present, a remarkable high portion of the contemporary drugs are directly or indirectly derived from MAP secondary metabolites [1,4,5]. All this pushes up the demands for plant-derived bioactive compounds, and their availability becomes one of the main bottlenecks to secure and expand their pharmaceutical use.…”

“…(a) Development and characterization of CHRC for a large number of MAP species, which makes possible the evaluation of their ability and limitations for secondary metabolite production [10] (b) Characterization of hairy root cultures developed after Agrobacterium rhizogenes transformation of various MAP species, providing increased in vitro culture stability and high content of desired secondary metabolites and in some cases production of valuable secondary metabolites not produced by the initial MAP itself [11][12][13] (c) Large number of studies on optimization of various culture conditions and accumulation of significant data and knowledge for development of high growth rate and biomass production cultures [14,15] (d) Significant improvement of bioreactor design and cultivation, providing culture scale-up efficiency and base for further (semi-)industrial volumes of cultivation [16] (e) Development of efficient elicitor treatments for a large number of the established MAP cultures, providing increased production of targeted bioactive compounds [17] In spite of these positive developments, the successful industrial applications of MAP cell and hairy root cultures for production of bioactive compounds are very limited. For example, Hendrawati et al [1] counted only 14 commercialized plant cell lines used for industrial secondary metabolite production. One of the main constraints of using plant cell cultures for the industrial secondary metabolite production is the low amount of desired compounds produced and accumulated by the undifferentiated cells observed for most of the tested plant cell lines.…”

Evaluation of the Conditions for the Cultivation of Callus Cultures of Hyssopus officinalis Regarding the Yield of Polyphenolic Compounds

“…Obtaining biologically active substances from callus cultures is an area of interest because refining the nutrient medium can stimulate the biosynthesis of target biologically active substances and increase their yield [ 6 , 7 ]. The production of natural compounds via callus cultures of medicinal plants is promising in the development of industrial biotechnology for obtaining medically valuable substances [ 8 ]. The antioxidant activities and contents of polyphenolic compounds in medicinal plants in Siberia have been well studied, in a quantitative fashion [ 9 , 10 , 11 ].…”