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“Hairy Root” Technology: An Emerging Arena for Heterologous Expression of Biosynthetic Pathway Genes in Medicinal Plants

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Transgenesis and Secondary Metabolism

Part of the book series: Reference Series in Phytochemistry ((RSP))

Abstract

Plant-based secondary metabolites play an important role towards the drug development process, but their lower yield in the source plant and uncertainty in supply owing to miscellaneous intervening factors have necessitated biotechnological intervention for devising suitable and economical alternative production systems. The progression of innovative biotechnological tools in tandem with the understanding of the plant metabolic pathways at both biochemical and cellular levels through combining the accumulating knowledge of next-generation sequencing has opened up new avenues for metabolic engineering of biosynthetic pathways. In this context, hairy root (HR) cultures have emerged as a promising platform for tailoring the metabolic flux of a given plant system towards the overproduction of desired metabolites by heterologously or homologously expressing the rate-limiting genes. A rational utilization of such cultures of diverse medicinal plants for heterologous expression of targeted pathway genes has started gaining attention over the years in order to overcome the co-suppression related to normally encountered disadvantages of homologous overexpression. The potential and appropriateness of this approach have gathered the maximum momentum during recent years even though such studies have come into existence for more than two decades ago. The present review summarizes the overall reported advances made in the area of hairy root-mediated heterologous expression of rate-limiting key genes of diverse biosynthetic pathways which remained mainly concentrated on tropane alkaloid, terpene indole alkaloid, and mevalonate and phenylpropanoid pathways. Successful implementation of the entire procedure is also found to be reigned by several other underlying factors, amongst which characteristic/exclusivity of plant families, A. rhizogenes strains’ specificities, explant types, promoters’ specifications and media constituents which are some of the prominent deciding factors that differed amongst the reported observations and have been outlined in this review.

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Acknowledgments

The authors wish to express their sincere thanks to the Director, CSIR-CIMAP, for providing the facilities to carry out similar types of research at the Institute. SS and PP are thankful to the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR, New Delhi, India) and the Department of Science and Technology (DST, New Delhi, India), respectively, for financial supports in the form of fellowships. Further acknowledgment also goes to the Academy of Scientific and Innovative Research (AcSIR-CIMAP).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Plant Biotechnology, Central Institute of Medicinal and Aromatic Plants (CSIR-CIMAP), Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, 226015, India

    Suchitra Banerjee, Sailendra Singh & Pallavi Pandey

Authors
  1. Suchitra Banerjee
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  2. Sailendra Singh
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  3. Pallavi Pandey
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Correspondence to Suchitra Banerjee .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Botany, Centre of Advanced Study, University of Calcutta, Kolkata, India

    Sumita Jha

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Banerjee, S., Singh, S., Pandey, P. (2017). “Hairy Root” Technology: An Emerging Arena for Heterologous Expression of Biosynthetic Pathway Genes in Medicinal Plants. In: Jha, S. (eds) Transgenesis and Secondary Metabolism. Reference Series in Phytochemistry. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28669-3_7

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