6. Production of Natural Products by Plant Cell and Organ Cultures

Summary

Natural products have been used as medicines, food additives or in technical applications by humans since thousands of years. Due to various reasons, a sufficient supply of the plant raw material has become increasingly difficult in recent years. Since more than 30 years, laboratories worldwide are trying to produce natural products for commercial application with plant cell and organ cultures. The commercial success of this research is still very limited, due to too low product yields resulting into production costs, which are not acceptable. Among organ cultures, root and hairy root cultures are the most promising for the production of secondary metabolites in good yields. This chapter describes the methods used to overcome these intrinsic problems in product yields and the hopes which are set on the new developments to transfer the appropriate plant genes into microorganisms, which may become more applicable for large scale production of plant natural products than plant cells themselves. First results in this field, e.g. the synthesis of benzylisoquinoline alkaloids in recombinant yeast cells, are already very promising.