Engineering Approaches to Enhancing Secondary Metabolite Production in Plant Tissue Culture

本研究将利用两阶段植物组织培养系统，研究各种环境因素对次生代谢物产生控制的影响。为此目的选择的模型系统是由大蓝花和/或鼠尾草种生产迷迭香酸（一种抗水肿药物）。要研究的环境因素包括溶解氧/二氧化碳、剪切和传质。后两个因素涉及搅动和细胞聚集对次生代谢物产生的影响。这项研究的重要性是双重的。首先，它不仅有助于工程师获得植物悬浮细胞系统的放大数据，因为它有一个简单的模型系统来工作，而且植物生理学家和遗传学家更喜欢植物悬浮培养而不是田间作物来进行他们的实验。第二，由于人口增长及其相关的住房需求侵蚀了农业生产的土地使用，因此必须有利用和扩大用于生产重要化学品和药物的植物细胞系统的经验。植物细胞在生物反应器中生长，可以在第三个维度上扩展，而大田作物只能在两个维度上扩展，这提供了一种替代的生产手段，特别是有价值的药物。

This study will utilize a two stage plant tissue culture system to study the effect of various environmental factors on the control of secondary metabolite production. The model system chosen for this purpose is the production of rosmarinic acid (an antiedema drug) by species of Coleus blumei and/or Salvia officinalis. The environmental factors to be investigated include dissolved oxygen/carbondioxide, shear, and mass transfer. These latter two factors involve the effects of agitation and cell aggregation on secondary metabolite production. The importance of this study is two-fold. First, not only will it be useful to the engineer in obtaining scale-up data for plant suspension cell systems to have a simple model system with which to work, but also the plant physiologist and geneticist prefer plant suspension cultures rather than field crops in which to carry out their experiments. Secondly, experience in working with and scaling up plant cell systems for the production of important chemicals and drugs will become necessary as population growth and its associated housing needs encroaches on land use for agriculture production. Plant cell growth in bioreactors, which can expand in a third dimension compared with only two dimensions for field crops, offers an alternative means of production, particularly of valuable drugs.