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

Differentiated cells of higher plants have abilities to synthesize a diverse range of valuable phytochemicals for agricultural, forestry and pharmaceutical industries. Recent development in plant tissue culture techniques of high value snow lotus medical plant has made it possible to use less differentiated callus to produce secondary metabolites. Fast growing suspension cells of snow lotus is applied in this project for scale-up of laboratory to commercial level of bioreactors is even more difficult for plant cells cultures than for most microbial fermentations. The main difficulties with large-up systems are the shear sensitivity of the cells and mass transfer limitation. Therefore, low shear uniform mixing and sufficient oxygen transfer capacity are two essential prerequisites to the successful design of most plant cell cultural bioreactors. In this study, a modified stirred bioreactor is developed and designed for the efficient cell growth and production. The modified stirred bioreactor can proceed simultaneously mixing and aeration under various operating conditions. Therefore, it is expected that the novel bioreactor provides high oxygen transfer rates to maintain suspended cells of snow lotus in a low-shear environment. Additionally, since the system can protect the suspended snow lotus cells in vigorously agitated culture medium in bioreactor, the production of secondary metabolites might be increased under the vigorous agitation. 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, combined with academic available snow lotus suspension cell culture system and bioinformatics-based big data analysis from co-PIs, so we are able explore more applications than existing knowledge for snow lotus. To maintain the stability of excellent snow lotus cell lines, the project will develop long-term cryopreservation system for snow lotus suspension cells.

Project ID:PB10511-0472
External Project ID:MOST105-2622-E182-003-CC2