The Use of Plant Biotechnology for an Enhanced Productivity and Conservation of Medicinal Plants

A special issue of Plants (ISSN 2223-7747). This special issue belongs to the section "Phytochemistry".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (20 December 2021) | Viewed by 8706

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
Indigenous Knowledge Systems Centre, Faculty of Natural and Agricultural Sciences, North-West University, Mmabatho 2745, NW, South Africa
Interests: IKS; phytomedicine; conservation; ethnopharmacology; antioxidants; antimicrobial; herbal cosmetics; phytocosmetics; cosmeceutical; phytochemicals
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Guest Editor
Department of Botany and Zoology, Faculty of Science, Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch 7600, South Africa
Interests: alkaloids; specialized metabolism; phytochemicals; natural products; essential oils; plant molecular biology; plant cell culture; gene transformation; terpenois; medicinal plants

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The journal Plants will be publishing a Special Issue on “The Use of Plant Biotechnology for an Enhanced Productivity and Conservation of Medicinal Plants”.

For centuries, humans have explored plants for medicinal purposes, and medicinal plants have remained a valuable source of therapeutic agents with many of today’s drugs being plant-derived natural products or their derivatives. As a result of the extensive dependence and collection from the wild, local populations of medicinal plants are continuously under severe pressure to meet the increasing demand locally, nationally, and internationally. Increased anthropogenic activities have contributed to the destruction of natural habitats of many medicinal plants, and this has resulted in diverse conservation status (e.g., declining, threatened, and endangered or even extinct). Thus, exploring new approaches with the potential to mitigate diminishing populations, loss of genetic diversity, local extinctions, and habitat degradation for medicinal plants remains pertinent.

The expanding biotechnological tools and techniques (e.g., in vitro regeneration and genetic transformations and genome editing) are useful as regards ensuring the rapid clonal proliferation and maintenance of genetic integrity of medicinal plants as a means for their conservation. In addition, these approaches offer a controlled platform for the enhanced production of valuable secondary metabolites which remain highly valued as nutraceutical cosmeceutical and pharmaceutical sectors.

This Special Issue will highlight the increasing use and optimization of different biotechnological techniques for improving the production and conservation of medicinal plants. In addition, manuscripts focusing on the application of these approaches for the production of valuable phytochemicals will be considered.

Dr. Adeyemi Oladapo Aremu
Prof. Dr. Nokwanda (Nox) P. Makunga
Guest Editors

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Keywords

  • Antimicrobial
  • Antioxidant
  • Biological activities
  • Bioreactors
  • Cell suspension culture
  • Conservation
  • Cryopreservation
  • Elicitors
  • Genetic transformation
  • Genomics
  • Gene editing
  • Hairy root culture
  • Medicinal plants
  • Micropropagation
  • Molecular biology
  • Phenolic acids
  • Phytochemicals
  • Phytohormones
  • Secondary (specialized) metabolites
  • Somatic embryogenesis
  • Stress

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Review

34 pages, 1945 KiB  
Review
Cannabis sativa: From Therapeutic Uses to Micropropagation and Beyond
by Tristan K. Adams, Nqobile A. Masondo, Pholoso Malatsi and Nokwanda P. Makunga
Plants 2021, 10(10), 2078; https://doi.org/10.3390/plants10102078 - 30 Sep 2021
Cited by 13 | Viewed by 7767
Abstract
The development of a protocol for the large-scale production of Cannabis and its variants with little to no somaclonal variation or disease for pharmaceutical and for other industrial use has been an emerging area of research. A limited number of protocols have been [...] Read more.
The development of a protocol for the large-scale production of Cannabis and its variants with little to no somaclonal variation or disease for pharmaceutical and for other industrial use has been an emerging area of research. A limited number of protocols have been developed around the world, obtained through a detailed literature search using web-based database searches, e.g., Scopus, Web of Science (WoS) and Google Scholar. This article reviews the advances made in relation to Cannabis tissue culture and micropropagation, such as explant choice and decontamination of explants, direct and indirect organogenesis, rooting, acclimatisation and a few aspects of genetic engineering. Since Cannabis micropropagation systems are fairly new fields, combinations of plant growth regulator experiments are needed to gain insight into the development of direct and indirect organogenesis protocols that are able to undergo the acclimation stage and maintain healthy plants desirable to the Cannabis industry. A post-culture analysis of Cannabis phytochemistry after the acclimatisation stage is lacking in a majority of the reviewed studies, and for in vitro propagation protocols to be accepted by the pharmaceutical industries, phytochemical and possibly pharmacological research need to be undertaken in order to ascertain the integrity of the generated plant material. It is rather difficult to obtain industrially acceptable micropropagation regimes as recalcitrance to the regeneration of in vitro cultured plants remains a major concern and this impedes progress in the application of genetic modification technologies and gene editing tools to be used routinely for the improvement of Cannabis genotypes that are used in various industries globally. In the future, with more reliable plant tissue culture-based propagation that generates true-to-type plants that have known genetic and metabolomic integrity, the use of genetic engineering systems including “omics” technologies such as next-generation sequencing and fast-evolving gene editing tools could be implemented to speed up the identification of novel genes and mechanisms involved in the biosynthesis of Cannabis phytochemicals for large-scale production. Full article
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