Publication: Agrobacterium-mediated genetic transformation: A Cutting-edge Approach for enhanced secondary metabolites production

The BioVT group published together with partners from the Tanta University (Egypt) and the University of Bradford (UK) the chapter "Agrobacterium-mediated genetic transformation: A Cutting-edge Approach for enhanced secondary metabolites production" in the book "Propagation to Pharmacopeia - Modern Approaches in Medicinal Plants". 

Plant secondary metabolites play pivotal and multifunctional roles, including mediators for plant-surrounding environment interactions such as repellent, antimicrobial, and toxins. Also, they show potential health promoting effects that have attracted interest for decades for investigating their production pathways as a tool for involved genes upregulation. Agrobacterium sp. are phytopathogens resulting in a crown gall tumor (Agrobacterium tumefaciens) or abnormal roots known as hairy roots (A. rhizogenes) by transferring Ti-plasmids or Ri-plasmids, respectively, to the host plant’s cells. Therefore, Agrobacterium-mediated transformation is recognized as a plant tissue culture that includes a genetic modification used to improve crop plants' stress tolerance, productivity, nutritional content, and pest resistance. Interestingly, this technique has shown a great potential for increasing secondary bioactive metabolites production, overcoming climatic, seasonal, and environmental variations. Many researchers are currently taking advantage of this phenomena in an effort to increase the production of bioactive natural products for use in industry and medicine on a larger scale. Furthermore, many studies have investigated the positive effect of nanoparticles (NPs) in Agrobacterium-transformed cultures, where they were recognized as potential elicitors for various metabolic pathways involved in bioactives production. This chapter reviews the history, the process of plant cell transformation, the benefits, the difficulties, and the latest uses of Agrobacterium-mediated transformation, which has been used to produce a wide range of naturally occurring bioactive compounds.

M.I. Elshorbagy, J. Haffelder, R. Ulber, C.W. Wright, A. Zayed; Agrobacterium-mediated genetic transformation: A Cutting-edge Approach for enhanced secondary metabolites production; in: Abha Manohar K, Gopal Shukla, Saikat Gantait, A.P. Das, Sumit Chakravarty (Eds.) Propagation to Pharmacopeia - Modern Approaches in Medicinal Plants; CRC Press ISBN 9781032729992 (2024) accepted paper