Hairy root culture: An efficient system for secondary metabolite production

Abstract

Plants are a potential source for the discovery of new products of medicinal value and served as lead compounds for drug development. Tremendous efforts have been made to commercialize production of plant metabolites employing plant cell culture in bioreactors, but very few have achieved commercial success. Hairy root culture is an unsurpassed choice for bio-processing system for various root associated pharmaceuticals due to fast growth rate, easy culture, genetic manipulations and most important biochemical stability of neoplastic roots. It serves as a model system for plant metabolism and physiology and utilized as a technical alternative to plant cell suspension culture. Moreover, hairy root culture plays a significant role in design the principle for plant metabolic engineering, germplasm conservation, expression of foreign protein and phytoremedaition. However, its global utilization requires attempts on the establishment of effective and economical scaled up culture that can reduce the consumption, but obtain the biggest benefits.