Current approaches for enhancing secondary plant production in vitro

Higher plants are an important source of secondary metabolites such as flavours, fragrances, dyes, pigments, food additives, terpenoids, alkaloids, and glycosides with medicinal importance. Several of these secondary plant products also form the basis for drug development. Today, several countries use plant derived chemicals as drugs with modifications. Unfortunately, these secondary plant products are synthesized in very low quantities. Therefore, cultured plant cells, tissues and organs such as hairy roots become an alternative source for enhancing the bioactive compounds. Elevated levels of secondary plant products have been reported from tissue cultures of various medicinal plants and bioreactors are vital for the commercial production. Also, in several instances, biochemistry of the biosynthetic pathway/s is not known, in case if it is known, the corresponding genes have not yet been isolated. In such a scenario, there is an urgent need to integrate large scale sequencing data, metabolomics, transcriptomics and proteomics. But, perhaps functional genomics holds the key to link the gene with the metabolite and subsequently genetic engineering of plant secondary metabolism for enhancing the secondary metabolites.