Plant cell culture technology, a cutting-edge technology to solve the sustainable development of plant resources

With the rapid development of China's cosmetic market and consumer upgrading, the safety and efficacy of cosmetics are becoming more and more important to consumers, and the admiration for naturalness and environmental protection has become one of the popular trends, and the application of Plant Extracts (plant active ingredients) in cosmetics is an inevitable trend in the market.

Cosmetics formulated with plant extracts as active ingredients can overcome the shortcomings of traditional cosmetics that rely on chemical synthetics, and their natural components are more compatible and therefore have higher safety and efficacy.

As a result, a number of cosmetic companies featuring natural ingredients have emerged internationally and domestically. For example, Biotech Marine (France) extracts active ingredients from French sea fennel, deep-sea ink algae and other plants as functional raw materials for cosmetics. LUMENE, Finland's number one cosmetic company, uses ingredients from plants such as the hingan fruit and bramble berry to produce products.

The development of domestic cosmetic enterprises featuring plant extracts is also very rapid, and a number of brands such as Xiang Yi Ben Cao, Bai Cao Ji, Perrier and Pientzehuang have emerged, and enterprises such as Shanghai Jahwa and Perrier have already laid out the upstream plant raw material production link by self-built production capacity.

The Regulation on Supervision and Management of Cosmetics introduced in 2021 clearly mentions that it encourages the use of modern science and technology to combine traditional advantageous items and characteristic plant resources to research and develop cosmetics. It is foreseeable that the application scenario of plant extracts as raw materials in cosmetics will be more extensive.

In response to market demand, finding new natural health ingredients from plants has become the focus of R&D and marketing for many cosmetic companies. Tissue culture technology (also known as healing tissue culture), together with synthetic biology, has become the main development direction for the continued development of natural-based ingredients.

As regulations become more sophisticated, traditional plant extraction technologies are facing more and more challenges. Relatively speaking, tissue culture technology has significant advantages over traditional plant extraction techniques.

Plant extracts as raw materials for cosmetics are still mainly grown, harvested and extracted from traditional agriculture (including forestry), and their large-scale application is limited by the natural disadvantages of traditional agriculture, such as land, extreme weather, pesticide residues, chemical fertilizers, heavy metal residues, etc.

First, climate change, especially the frequent occurrence of extreme weather greatly affects the yield of raw materials, and the price of raw materials varies greatly, even affecting the downstream supply.

Second, different planting environments, even the same environment, different batches of plants, the active ingredient content will change, increasing the cost of raw material standardization.

iii. the problem of pesticide, chemical fertilizer and heavy metal residues brought by large-scale planting increases the cost of harmless treatment of raw materials.

iv. active ingredients that are beneficial to the human body are often found in very low levels in plants, which greatly pushes up the cost of their application.

Fifth, the problem of sustainability of scarce plant resources, such as snow lotus extract due to the lack of commercializable resources, which limits its application in cosmetics.

All of the above reasons have been the bottlenecks that plague the development of plant-based ingredients, resulting in the high cost of comprehensive application of plant extracts as raw materials, the Plant extract market is uneven, and more become a concept and gimmick for brand propaganda.

In order to circumvent the drawbacks of traditional agriculture, the industry has been researching and exploring the use of plant cell (tissue) culture technology to obtain plant extracts in a more stable manner, dating back to 1956 when Routine and Nickel first proposed the use of plant cell culture technology to produce useful secondary metabolites.

Plant cell culture technology, also known as ex vivo culture technology, is a technique for isolating tissues, organs or cells, protoplasts, etc. that meet the needs of the plant body, inoculating them under aseptic conditions on a medium containing various nutrients and phytohormones, and using them in culture to obtain regenerated complete plants or to produce other products of economic value, based on the principle of using the totipotency of plant cells.

The industry has accumulated some experience in using plant cell culture technology to obtain plant extracts, and some of these species have been industrialized.

In 1983, Mitsui Petrochemical Industries of Japan was the first to achieve large-scale culture of comfrey cells for the production of paclitaxel, which was industrially produced as a dye and drug. 2002, Vitrosys and CBN Biotech of Korea carried out large-scale culture of the adventitious root of mountain ginseng for use in nutraceuticals. 2004, Phyton of Canada In 2004, Phyton Biotech of Canada won the U.S. President's Green Chemistry Award for its process technology of producing paclitaxel on a large scale using red fir cells.

China's research and application of plant cell culture technology is currently focused on the food and pharmaceutical industries, among which research breakthroughs have been made in plant cell culture of ginseng, American ginseng, sequoia (paclitaxel) and snowdrop, and industrialization has been achieved in varieties of ginseng-based health products and paclitaxel APIs.

However, on the whole, problems such as difficulty in scaling up are still major challenges to the large-scale application of plant cell technology. Most plant cell culture technologies still remain at the laboratory research level, and the high cost also limits the wide application of this technology in cosmetics, and the research and development of engineering scaling up and scaling up technologies for plant cell culture has become a major industrial problem that needs to be solved urgently at present.

Shaanxi Huike Botanical Development Co., Ltd. a integrated enterprise which is focus on natural products, plant extract related products and services.We mainly focus on pharmaceutical, functional food, Freeze-dried powder,Natural Pigment,beverages and other business services.

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Email:marketing@huikes.com

2023-1-28

Shaanxi Huike Botanical Development Co., Ltd.