[Industrialization of medicinal plant tissue culture]

Compared with other countries, the industrialization of medicinal plant tissue culture is more important for our country because China is consuming and exporting the most amounts of herb materials in the world. Each year, many papers and patents are published on cell cultures of popular medicinal plants, such as Taxus sp., Catharanthus roseus, and Panax ginseng, and, meanwhile, the research on organ cultures of medicinal plants is increasing very quickly, which is deepening the study of medicinal plant tissue culture. During the past 30 years, Chinese scientists have cultured many medicinal plant cells, organs and hairy roots. In addition, the large-scale cultures have been tested on medicinal plants, such as Catharanthus roseus, Panax notoginseng, Anisodus acutangulus, Lithospermum erythrorhizon, and Taxus chinensis. However, the bioreactor size is not big enough for the commercial cultivation and we have not mastered the culture technique on a large scale. We should clearly understand the importance and great potential benefit of medicinal plant tissue culture and develop the tissue culture techniques for the modernization of TCM. To develop the technique that we have the property right, the pioneering spirit is needed in our research, and, meanwhile, it should be pointed out emphatically the collaboration is indispensable among scientists from different research fields.