ABSTRACT
The journey of drug discovery from plant natural products is practiced from the development of first medicine, morphine and still continuing in the modern era. The plant Withaniasomnifera (Ashwagandha), known as Indian Ginseng is one of the most reputed medicinal plants of Ayurveda, principally due to the presence of steroidal lactone, collectively known as withanolides. The withanolides are C-28 steroidal lactone triterpenoids having ergostane structure backbone. In this structure, six membered lactone ring was formed after the oxidation of C-22 and C-26 carbon atoms. Among various withanolides, withaferin A, withanolide A and withanone are the most abundant. The withanolides has been well studied for its antiserotogenic, addaptogenic, neuroprotective and anticancer activity in addition to widely known for their antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, immunomodulating, anti-stress and rejuvenating properties. The industrial demand of dried plant material with respect to withanolide drugs preparation from this species is increasing gradually which fail to meet the current ashwagandha global market by our conventional cultivation method due to a range of issues such as low seed viability and poor germination, biotic and abiotic environmental factors, soil ecological factors fail to maintain uniform withanolide synthesis, accumulate and moreover, these methods are time consuming and laborious. Under such circumstances, biotechnological advances must be adopted to increase the yield for the continuous supply of bioactive compounds. In vitro cell, tissue and organ culture could offer an alternative to field-grown plants for seasonal independent production of cellular biomass in a large scale which will deliver an adequate number of raw materials of uniform quality for pharmaceutical purposes. Other biotechnological methods are also involved such as the application of various elicitors, feeding of precursor molecules, genetic transformation particularly hairy root culture, genetic engineering specifically metabolic engineering and exploitation of bioreactor technology for quality production in huge quantity.
