Root Cultures for Secondary Products

Plants are source of many high-value secondary compounds used as drugs, food additives, flavors, pigments and pesticides. The production of these compounds in nature faces to many difficulties because of the dependence on weather, soil … Furthermore, these compounds are usually limited by species, periods of growth or stress. The utilization of plant cells in vitro for the secondary compounds has gained increasing attention over past decades. However, the yield is still low, probably due to the degree of cell differentiation. Therefore, root culture is focused on research as an alternative to cell cultures to produce secondary compounds because of high rate proliferation, great potential in the production with high and stable yields. Hairy roots and adventitious roots have a high ability to biosynthesize secondary compounds in vitro with high and fairly stable in yield in comparison with plant cell suspension cultures. Nowadays, it is feasible to expand the scale of root cultures in bioreactors, which makes it possible to produce secondary compounds on an industrial scale.