Development and Evaluation of Snow Lotus Cell Suspension for Business Applications( II )

Recent development in plant tissue culture techniques has made Snow lotus, a Chinese herb with high medical value, possible to use less differentiated callus to produce secondary metabolites. Cultivation of snow lotus suspension cells is applied in this project, and further in commercial level of bioreactors. The main difficulties to deal with in cell scale-up are shear sensitivity and mass transfer limitation. Low shear uniform mixture and sufficient oxygen transfer capacity are two essential prerequisites to the success in most plant cell cultural bioreactors. In this study, a modified stirred bioreactor is developed for the efficient cell growth and production to allow stir and aeration at the same time. The collaborated biotechnological company in this project has developed a secondary metabolite analysis system and animal cell cultures system to test effects of phytochemicals produced from snow lotus suspension cells. In addition to inhibition of cancer cells, we will explore possible applications of snow lotus in diseases under our existing suspension cell culture system and bioinformatics-based big data analysis system. To maintain the stability of excellent snow lotus cell lines, the project will develop long-term cryopreservation system for snow lotus suspension cells. Based on the experimental results of the first year project, we selected the excellent snow lotus cell line, and training the cell line into suspension cell culture. The culture medium was further modified for the fast growing under the dark condition. In addition to the secondary metabolite analysis system, Bioinformatics-based big data assay system, and a modified cryopreservation system for snow lotus suspension cells, a small scale bioreactor was used for some preliminary tests in our first year project. In second year, this study a large scale bioreactor with the modified medium we developed will be applied to find the optimized culture strategy. Long-tern cryopreservation will be continually to modify the cry protectant for a better survival rate after thawing the frozen cells. The cell extract of snow lotus will be treated with mammalian cell lines, and gene expression data will be analyzed by the Bioinformatics-based big data analysis system built earlier to extend the medical application of snow lotus.

Project ID:PB10611-0181
External Project ID:MOST106-2622-E182-001-CC2