The advent of plant cells in bioreactors

Abstract

Ever since agriculture started, plants have been bred to obtain better yields, better fruits, or sustainable products under uncertain biotic and abiotic conditions. However, a new way to obtain products from plant cells emerged with the development of recombinant DNA technologies. This led to the possibility of producing exogenous molecules in plants. Furthermore, plant chemodiversity has been the main source of pharmacological molecules, opening a field of plant biotechnology directed to produce high quality plant metabolites. The need for different products by the pharma, cosmetics agriculture and food industry has pushed again to develop new procedures. These include cell production in bioreactors. While plant tissue and cell culture are an established technology, beginning over a hundred years ago, plant cell cultures have shown little impact in biotechnology projects, compared to bacterial, yeasts or animal cells. In this review we address the different types of bioreactors that are currently used for plant cell production and their usage for quality biomolecule production. We make an overview of Nicotiana tabacum, Nicotiana benthamiana, Oryza sativa, Daucus carota, Vitis vinifera and Physcomitrium patens as well-established models for plant cell culture, and some species used to obtain important metabolites, with an insight into the type of bioreactor and production protocols.

Differential prolyl hydroxylation by six Physcomitrella prolyl-4 hydroxylases

“…Plants are gaining increasing importance for the production of valuable compounds, such as pharmaceuticals. While most production hosts are vascular plants, such as Nicotiana benthamiana (Nicotiana) and Daucus carota (carrot), the non-vascular moss Physcomitrella has a proven track-record for the production of pharmaceuticals and bioactive ingredients (Decker and Reski, 2020; Verdú-Navarro et al, 2023; Munoz et al, 2024). In our attempts to constantly optimize this moss for molecular farming approaches (Reski et al, 2015; Ruiz-Molina et al, 2023), we concentrate on gene expression (e.g., Top et al, 2021; Niederau et al, 2024), bioproduction (e.g., Ruiz-Molina et al, 2022), and glycoengineering (e.g., Decker and Reski, 2012; Bohlender et al, 2022).…”

Bioreactor Systems for Plant Cell Cultivation at the Institute of Plant Physiology of the Russian Academy of Sciences: 50 Years of Technology Evolution from Laboratory to Industrial Implications

“…To meet these specifics, bioreactors for plant cell cultivation should be both structurally and operationally complex. The main engineering challenges are to maintain a high intensity of mass and energy exchange between the cells and culture medium, to minimize cell damage during mixing, to aseptically monitor technological parameters, in particular, the concentrations of cell biomass and target metabolites, and to minimize the cost of the process [15,52,54].…”

“…The large spectrum of cell cultures led to a huge variety of engineering solutions based on cell strain characteristics, medium used, production scale, specifics of the product isolation, etc. [15,52,[54][55][56]. Several attempts have been made to classify bioreactors for plant cell cultivation.…”

“…Several attempts have been made to classify bioreactors for plant cell cultivation. In the literature, bioreactors are most often grouped based on their constructions [20,52,[54][55][56] into the following types:…”

“…It is worth noting that the scaling principles for the bioreactor cultivation of plant cells are still being developed. From the technological viewpoint, plant cell cultures are challenging to work with, hence the difficulties to standardize and unambiguous specify the critical scaling parameters for each cell strain [52,54].…”