Harnessing the Potential of Plant Tissue Culture Techniques for the Herbal Industry

Over the past few years, there has been a tremendous global shift of preference toward herbal medicine because of its affordability, accessibility, efficacy, and lesser side effects. The pharmacological and healing properties of the herbs are due to the presence of a wide array of secondary metabolites. These metabolites are biosynthesized through defined pathways and stored in various parts of the plant, like leaf, root, rhizome, bark, and floral parts. In recent years due to the growing realization of the pharmaceutical properties of medicinal plants, they have been subjected to indiscriminate exploitation. Further, the lack of agrotechnology in many cases and the nonavailability of broad genetic diversity provide impediments to their largescale cultivation and improvement. This situation has created a huge gap between the demand and supply of medicinal plants all over the world. Hence, rapidly propagating high valued medicinal plants through unconventional technologies is warranted and will provide high dividends to farmers and the herbal industry. Further, generating large-scale healthy, genetically uniform plants with defined chemical content will facilitate pre-clinical and translational studies. Therefore, efforts in the development of robust in vitro propagation systems for herbal plants can address the core concern of their conservation and large-scale utilization. Studies on cell suspension, hairy root culture, and genetic transformation have provided the desired impetus in metabolic engineering and enhanced their commercial value. The present article highlights some of these developments and provides a futuristic perspective on the subject.

Keywords: Cell suspension culture, Hairy root culture, Herbal medicine, Medicinal plants, Metabolic engineering, Micropropagation, Secondary metabolites.