Atractylodes chinensis (DC.) Koidz, a medicinal plant widely used for the treatment of gastric diseases, is mainly distributed in East Asian regions, including our country and China. Its main bioactive compounds are sesquiterpenoids such as atractylon and β-eudesmol. Adventitious root culture is one of the bioengineering tools widely used for the industrial production of secondary metabolites of medicinal plants by culturing adventitious roots formed from tissues of vegetative organs such as roots, stems, and leaves by in vitro organogenesis.
We optimized the important conditions of adventitious root induction and suspension cultures with the aim of establishing the A. chinensis adventitious root culture system for the in vitro production of its main bioactive compounds (atractylon and β-eudesmol). Our research results showed that adventitious roots were the most efficiently induced from leaf explants on MS solid medium containing 1.5 mg/L NAA and 30 g/L sucrose with the highest root induction rate of 92 %. We also found that adventitious roots cultured in 1/2MS liquid medium supplemented with 2.0 mg/L IBA, 3.2 mg/L NAA, and 40 g/L sucrose (pH 5.8) with the inoculum density of 8 g/L produced the maximum yield of the target compounds (2.66 mg). Our research provides a possibility to have a new promising candidate for the industrial production of A. chinensis pharmaceuticals without relying on wild resources or field cultivation.
This result was published in the "Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology" under the title of "In vitro production of atractylon and β-eudesmol from Atractylodes chinensis by adventitious root culture" (https://doi.org/10.1007/s00253-022-12194-5).
