Application of Tissue Culture Techniques to Improve the Productivity of Medicinal Secondary Products from Medicinal Plants

Abstract

The plant kingdom is considered the most important source of medicinal chemicals. In vitro culture techniques are being considered a promising alternative to traditional agricultural processes to improve medicinal plants multiplication and their production of pharmaceutical compounds. In this chapter, several in vitro culture strategies are discussed to improve secondary metabolites production, including (1) plant kingdom as a source of medicinal chemicals, (2) in vitro culture of medicinal plants, (3) culture media optimization, (4) application of suspension cell culture for production of secondary metabolites, (5) elicitation to enhance the productivity of the culture, (6) precursor intermediates feeding, (7) selection of high-yielding cell lines, (8) overexpression of genes that control the production of bioactive compounds, and (9) scale-up production. Also, challenges that hinder the in vitro culture of medicinal plants using different techniques and the use of those techniques to produce pharmaceutical compounds are discussed in this chapter, including (a) secondary metabolites toxicity, (b) low growth rate, (c) culture browning, (d) limitation in the application of transformation, (e) somaclonal variation, and (f) vitrification. Therefore, the principal objective of the current chapter was to shed light on the studies on some medicinal plants and the used protocols to overcome some difficulties in terms of in vitro propagation that maximize their economic values.