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Novel Approaches to Improve Plant Secondary Metabolite Production

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Plant Cell and Tissue Culture for the Production of Food Ingredients

Summary

Large-scale culture of plant cells is technically feasible. However, in most cases, yields of secondary metabolites are too low for commercialization. Growth of differentiated cells and elicitation are possible approaches to increase production. However, the first approach suffers from difficulties of large-scale culture, whereas the latter approach is limited to a specific class of compounds in each plant, which may not be the one of interest. Metabolic engineering seems to be an interesting approach. Based on examples of the terpenoid indole alkaloid biosynthesis, as among others found inCatharanthus roseussome of the possibilities and problems associated with metabolic engineering are discussed.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Division of Pharmacognosy Leiden/Amsterdam Center for Drug Research, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands

    R. Verpoorte & R. van der Heijden

  2. Department of Biochemical Engineering, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands

    H. J. G. ten Hoopen

  3. Institute of Molecular Plant Sciences, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands

    J. Memelink

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  1. R. Verpoorte
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  3. H. J. G. ten Hoopen
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Summit-Argo, Illinois, USA

    Tong-Jen Fu

  2. Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi, India

    Gurmeet Singh

  3. The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, USA

    Wayne R. Curtis

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Verpoorte, R., van der Heijden, R., ten Hoopen, H.J.G., Memelink, J. (1999). Novel Approaches to Improve Plant Secondary Metabolite Production. In: Fu, TJ., Singh, G., Curtis, W.R. (eds) Plant Cell and Tissue Culture for the Production of Food Ingredients. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-4753-2_8

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