Question

Reactor consideration for plant cell cultivation

Answer 1

Bioactive compounds extracted from plants are widely used. The natural habitats for a large number of plants are rapidly destroyed leading to extinction of many valuable and even endemic species. Studies on the production of plant metabolites by callus and cell suspension cultures have been carried out on an increasing scale since the end of the 1950's. The prospect of using such culturing techniques is for obtaining secondary metabolites, such as active compounds for pharmaceuticalss and cosmetics, hormones, enzymes, proteins, antigens, food additives and natural pesticides from the harvest of the cultured cells or tissues. The large scale cultivation of tobacco and a variety of vegetable cells was examined from the late 1950's to early 1960's initiating more recent studies on the industrial application of plant cell culture techniquesin many countries. The first patent for the cultivation of plant tissue was received in 1956. Shortly afterwards, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) started to support research in the field of plant cell cultures for regenerative life support systems (Sajc et al., 2000). Correspondence/Reprint request: Dr. Ozlem Yesil-Celiktas, Department of Bioengineering, Faculty of Engineering, Ege University, 35100 Bornova-Izmir, Turkey. E-mail: [email protected] Ozlem Yesil-Celiktas et al. 2In paralel to these achievements, industrial companies in Japan have tried to apply this technology for the commercial production of useful compounds in collaboration with some university groups. For instance, The Japan Tobacco Inc.'s interest involved around mass-production of tobacco cells as raw materials of cigarettes. Meiji Seika in Japan also elucidated the fundamentals of production of Panax ginseng cells in large volumes. The work was followed by Nitto Denko Co. which started manufacturing cell mass of ginseng commercially. Other firms such as Ajinomoto and Nippon Shin-yaku also made efforts to increase the level of accumulation of alkaloids, steroids and other secondary products in cultured cells (Misawa, 1994). Consequently, plant cell culture techniques have been used increasingly in basic research to improve cognitive interrelations and finally for exploitation in industry. The field of plant cell culture covers diverse sub-fields providing alternative approaches which may be attractive under certain circumstances; if the source plant: