Bioreactors: A rapid approach for secondary metabolite production

Abstract

Bioreactor technology is one of the most challenging avenues in the field of plant biotechnology. Realization of many practical applications for in vitro plant culture systems is dependent on the availability of efficient and well designed bioreactors. For an increasing number of plants bioreactors demonstrated a number of important advantages over conventional semi solid micropropagation including several fold increase in multiplication rates and reduction in space, energy and labor. Bioreactors provide an automated, cost-effective system for commercial in vitro plant propagation and low cost secondary metabolite production. They can also provide the technical means to perform controlled studies aimed at understanding specific biological, chemical, or physical effects. However several major bottlenecks which includes contamination, lack of protocols and production procedure, increased hyperhydricity and problems of foaming, shear stress and release of growth inhibiting compounds still restricts the commercial application of this technology. Many efforts are being made to design the bioreactors so as to eliminate all the limitations faced. Though still the existence of an efficient complete bioreactor design is unrealized.