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Plant Bioreactors: History
Please note this is an old version of this entry, which may differ significantly from the current revision.
Subjects: Plant Sciences
Contributor: Yu Peng

Plant bioreactors are controlled cultivation systems that maintain plant cells, tissues, organs, or organ-derived cultures while providing defined nutritional and physical conditions. The biological material may be suspended cells, hairy roots, shoots, embryos, or other organized structures producing biomass or specialized metabolites [1]. A plant bioreactor supplies liquid medium and regulates temperature, pH, gas exchange, mixing, and renewal of nutrients; illumination is added when photosynthetic or light-responsive material is used. Airlift, bubble-column, temporary-immersion, and mechanically agitated designs create different patterns of circulation and shear, affecting aggregation, differentiation, oxygen availability, and metabolite accumulation [2]. Plant cultures can be sensitive to mechanical stress and poor gas transfer, so vessel geometry and contact between tissue and medium must be selected carefully [1][3]. Operation may be batch, fed, or semi-continuous, with elicitors, precursors, hormones, or light changes used to redirect secondary metabolism. Evaluation includes growth rate, tissue quality, product concentration, genetic stability, contamination control, and reproducibility of harvested material [2][4].

  • plant cell culture
  • hairy-root culture
  • temporary immersion
  • secondary metabolites

Plant tissue culture and regeneration·Molecular Biology·Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology·Life Sciences

References

  1. Shuang Zhang; Meibing Ma; Ying Liu; Heng Jiang; Jie Gao; Quan Yang; Kunhua Wei; Bioreactor Technology for Medicinal Plant In Vitro Cultures: Systems, Applications, and Future Perspectives. Biology 2026, 15, 1025, 10.3390/biology15131025.
  2. Arun K. Sharma; Manoj K. Sharma; Plants as bioreactors: Recent developments and emerging opportunities. Biotechnol. Adv. 2009, 27, 811-832, 10.1016/j.biotechadv.2009.06.004.
  3. Maria Titova; Elena Popova; Alexander Nosov; Bioreactor Systems for Plant Cell Cultivation at the Institute of Plant Physiology of the Russian Academy of Sciences: 50 Years of Technology Evolution from Laboratory to Industrial Implications. Plants 2024, 13, 430, 10.3390/plants13030430.
  4. Shuang Zhang; Meibing Ma; Ying Liu; Heng Jiang; Jie Gao; Quan Yang; Kunhua Wei; Bioreactor Technology for Medicinal Plant In Vitro Cultures: Systems, Applications, and Future Perspectives. Biology 2026, 15, 1025, 10.3390/biology15131025.
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