Abstract

Plant secondary metabolites (SMs) are high-value, commercially significant chemical compounds produced by plants in response to various biotic and abiotic stimuli which are having high bioactive potential and are utilized in pharmaceutical, nutraceutical, cosmeceutical industries and more. But due to certain environmental, economic and geographic reasons, extracting such high-value metabolites in large-scale from intact plants are not practical. Due to its high demand and less availability, biotechnological approaches such as plant tissue culture have gained significant interest for increased production of commercially important SMs while preventing overexploitation and extinction of the source plants. To improve the productivity, certain methods like elicitation is carried out in cultures using various biotic and abiotic elicitors. Among them, nanoparticles (NPs) shows promising results in eliciting SMs in tissue culture systems due to their customizable physicochemical properties. Biogenic NPs are eco-friendly, non-toxic, economic and efficient than chemically and physically synthesized ones. Therefore, at present, there is an increased trend in utilizing such green synthesized NPs as elicitors. Such NPs with smaller size can easily penetrate the cells and cause significant biochemical and molecular changes within the plant cell leading to the activation of secondary metabolic pathways and thus resulting in enhanced production of SMs.

Key words: Secondary metabolites, Nanoparticles, Elicitation, Nanoelicitation, Plant tissue culture, Elicitation mechanism