Differences in cell morphology and gene expression enable plant stem cells (CMC) to grow continuously and stably at a high proliferation rate and maintain high productivity of active ingredients. However, with the passage of culture time, the cell lines of callus (DDC) lose the ability of proliferation or show variation, which cannot guarantee the production of stable and consistent effective components.
Therefore, plant stem cells (CMC) is the best tool for studying plant intelligence. Plant stem cells (CMC) can provide the following three advantages to study and develop plant intelligence:
1. Eternal Vitality
Like animal cells, the telomeres of plant cells are also progressively shortened during cell division. However, the plant stem cells (CMC) isolated by PIPSCI, contain active telomerase, which prevents the telomeres from being destroyed by cell division. Therefore, this means that plant stem cells (CMC) are immortal cells with eternal vitality.
Comparing with CMC, callus (DDC) only temporarily has the ability to “divide and differentiate”, through the process of dedifferentiation. As the number of cell divisions increases, genetic variation occurred frequently in DDCs, lead slow growth rate and low phytochemicals yield. But CMCs are innate undifferentiated and genetically stable, let them grow faster and produce phytochemicals stably.
2. Stable and Standardized Sample
Reproducible results are the most important in basic and clinical researches. The keys to reproducibility are consistent samples and stable experimental techniques. Inconsistent samples lead to inconsistent results. Batch variation is an innate feature of plants. For example, the quality and flavors of different batch of grape and coffee usually vary greatly. These refer to batch variation of phytochemicals of plants.
Callus is a heterogeneous mixture of dedifferentiated plant cells (Bark cells, xylem cells, phloem cells, etc), which means that the morphology, growth rate, gene expression and metabolic activity are different between each cell of callus. That is why the performance of callus culture is batch inconsistent. However, cultured CMCs are homogeneous, and each cell is the same, so the cell type, growth rate, gene expression and phytochemicals composition of each cell are all identical. With controlled and consistent culture conditions, we can get the stable and standardized cell samples and the batch consistence of CMCs could exceed 99%, which is very suitable for research experiment.
“Phytochemical Fingerprint” represents all the components and contents of phytochemicals of the given plant ,and can be used as a reference for plant identification and plant quality management. Hence, we adopted the “phytochemical fingerprint” as plant sample file management.
In the past, reliable chemical fingerprints cannot be made because of the batch difference of plants. Only plant samples with more than 99% batch consistency will allow researchers to construct chemical fingerprints that are specific to each plant. Therefore, in the future, isolate the stem cells of a certain Chinese herb through our plant stem cell technology, and then obtain the phytochemical fingerprint when culturing the cells (CMC) in a fixed culture environment, which will be of great help for identification and quality management of traditional Chinese medicine.
3. Diverse Sample
Not only can standardized samples be obtained, but also diversified samples can be obtained through plant stem cells technology.
CMCs could response to environmental stress, change gene expression pattern of the cells, and result in phytochemical fingerprint change. Benefited from consistent CMC samples, researchers could construct cutting-edge databases such as TRANSCRIPTOME DATABASES and PROTEOMIC DATABASES. They could identify biosynthesis and metabolism pathways and regulatory mechanisms of phytochemicals by changing the culture conditions of CMCs and observing the corresponding changes in these databases.
Immortalization, fast growth rate and stable phytochemicals production, these characteristics make CMCs long-term culture possible. Stable standardized sample and diversified sample output are guaranteed to build a perfect platform for commercial scale production of phytochemicals, which is crucial to phytochemical applicatioshen'wu'he'chens and commercialization.