Impact of Elicitation on Plant Antioxidants Production in Taxus Cell Cultures

Elicited cell cultures of Taxus spp. are successfully used as sustainable biotechnological production systems of the anticancer drug paclitaxel, but the effect of the induced metabolomic changes on the synthesis of other bioactive compounds by elicitation has been scarcely studied. In this work, a powerful combinatorial approach based on elicitation and untargeted metabolomics was applied to unravel and characterize the effects of the elicitors 1 µM of coronatine (COR) or 150 µM of salicylic acid (SA) on phenolic biosynthesis in Taxus baccata cell suspensions. Differential effects on cell growth and the phenylpropanoid biosynthetic pathway were observed. Untargeted metabolomics analysis revealed a total of 83 phenolic compounds, mainly flavonoids, phenolic acids, lignans, and stilbenes. The application of multivariate statistics identified the metabolite markers attributed to elicitation over time: up to 34 compounds at 8 days, 41 for 16 days, and 36 after 24 days of culture. The most notable metabolic changes in phenolic metabolism occurred after 8 days of COR and 16 days of SA elicitation. Besides demonstrating the significant and differential impact of elicitation treatments on the metabolic fingerprint of T. baccata cell suspensions, the results indicate that Taxus ssp. biofactories may potentially supply not only taxanes but also valuable phenolic antioxidants, in an efficient optimization of resources.