Metabolic engineering of artemisinin biosynthesis in Artemisia annua L. |
| |
Authors: | Benye Liu Hong Wang Zhigao Du Guofeng Li Hechun Ye |
| |
Affiliation: | (1) Key Laboratory of Photosynthesis and Environmental Molecular Physiology, Institute of Botany, The Chinese Academy of Sciences, Nanxincun 20, Haidian District, Beijing, 100093, China;(2) Institute of Pharmaceutical Biology, Technical University Braunschweig, Mendelssohnstr. 1, 38106 Braunschweig, Germany; |
| |
Abstract: | Artemisinin, a sesquiterpene lactone isolated from the Chinese medicinal plant Artemisia annua L., is an effective antimalarial agent, especially for multi-drug resistant and cerebral malaria. To date, A. annua is still the only commercial source of artemisinin. The low concentration of artemisinin in A. annua, ranging from 0.01 to 0.8% of the plant dry weight, makes artemisinin relatively expensive and difficult to meet the demand of over 100 million courses of artemisinin-based combinational therapies per year. Since the chemical synthesis of artemisinin is not commercially feasible at present, another promising approach to reduce the price of artemisinin-based antimalarial drugs is metabolic engineering of the plant to obtain a higher content of artemisinin in transgenic plants. In the past decade, we have established an Agrobacterium-mediated transformation system of A. annua, and have successfully transferred a number of genes related to artemisinin biosynthesis into the plant. The various aspects of these efforts are discussed in this review. |
| |
Keywords: | |
本文献已被 PubMed SpringerLink 等数据库收录! |
|