Agrobacterium rhizogenes is responsible for the formation of adventitious roots known as "hairy roots". Hairy roots result from the transfer and integration of the genes located on the root-inducing plasmid Ri of Agrobacterium rhizogenes into the plant genome and their expression therein.1) These roots are characterized by an extensive growth, associated with lateral branching, leading to an important mass of adventitious roots exhibiting a typical phenotype. Furthermore, these roots are found to produce a high yield of secondary metabolites as compared to that of undifferentiated plant cell suspensions.2-4) The greatest advantage of hairy roots is that hairy root cultures often exhibit about the same or greater biosynthetic capacity for secondary metabolite production compared to their mother plants. Hairy root cultures have been shown to accumulate many valuable secondary metabolites. For example, several laboratories have shown that hairy roots can produce artemisinin, tropane alkaloid, and so on. [5][6][7][8] Another advantage of hairy roots is that hairy root system is genetic stable compared to the roots of a whole plant. 9) Recently, many medicinal plants have been transformed successfully by A. rhizogenes and the hairy roots induced show a relatively high productivity of secondary metabolites, which are potentially important pharmaceutical products.10-13) Rhodiola sachalinensis A. BOR, a perennial herb, belonging to the family Crassulaceae, is mainly distributed in mountains at the altitudes of 1700-2500 m. It is a typical alpine plant and a very important medicinal plant with high activities of anti-fatigue, anti-senescence, and anti-radiation, due to the secondary metabolite salidroside, one of the major compounds from the roots of Rhodiola species (Crassulaceae).
14)Since the natural supply of this herb is rapidly decreasing, plant cell suspension culture has been considered an alternative of producing salidroside. Although there are some production of salidroside in the plant cell suspension culture of Rhodiola sachalinensis, 15) the biggest challenge of producing secondary metabolites from the suspension cultures is that secondary metabolites are usually produced by specialized cells differentiated at distinct developmental stages.16,17) To produce Salidroside more efficiently and stably, we established the hairy root system of Rhodiola sachalinensis for high yield salidroside production with A. rhizogenes. The results have demonstrated that salidroside production in most cases of the system is higher than in normal field-grown plants. This paper firstly reports the production of transformed roots using A. rhizogenes strain A4 and regeneration hairy roots from such transformants. The stable transformation of transgenes has been shown by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and PCR-Southern blotting. As far as it is known, this is the first time that salidroside production by hairy roots of Rhodiola sachalinensis obtained after transformation with Agrobacterium rhizogenes.
MATERIALS AND METHODS
Bacterial ...