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About the Book
Higher plants contain a variety of metabolites that are useful as medicines, food additives, perfumes, etc. Decreased plant resources, increases in labour costs and other problems in obtaining these valuable substances from natural plants have stimulated work in the area of plant cell culture for their production. Studies have been carried out on an increasing scale since the end of the 1950s and the results have stimulated more recent studies on the industrial application of this technology. A skin pigment, shikonin and ginseng cell biomass are currently manufactured in Japan. However, the low productivity of cultured plant cells has kept production costs high; production efficiency must be improved before many other products can be commercialized. This publication reviews the background of plant cell culture research, cost analysis, methods and facilities, various approaches to improving productivity and studies on a number of commercially interesting products that are currently being investigated.
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