ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with existing bioreactors for different plant cell and tissue culture types producing bioactive compounds. It includes a general section on historical development.
Studies on bioreactor production of useful and valuable metabolites in plant cell and tissue cultures as well as mass propagation procedures on a large scale have been carried out since the end of the 1950s. These results and efforts initiated a large number of studies, reviews, and patents focused on the industrial application of this technology in the 1980s. Although there are some industrial applications (e.g., production of shikonin, taxol, ginseng biomass, berberine) and several new products have just reached semicommercial production levels, no great progress has been achieved for the last 10 years. This limited commercialization is a consequence of the economic feasibility of most processes based on plant cell and tissue cultures.
