Large-scale plant cell culture.

Progress towards the commercial-scale use of plant cell cultures over the past three years has been significant. Elicitation, particularly with methyl jasmonate, has been effective at increasing the product yields of a wide variety of secondary metabolites, particularly when it is applied synergistically with enhancement strategies such as immobilization and in situ extraction. Rapid advances in understanding the regulation of the biosynthetic pathways of secondary metabolites are allowing the application of enhancement strategies to move from empirical to semirational. Much of this progress is exemplified by work on paclitaxel (Taxol), where yields have improved more than 100-fold in the past two years.