Structurally diverse natural products are valued for their targeted biological activity. The challenge of working with such metabolites is their low natural abundance and complex structure, often with multiple stereocenters, precludes large-scale or unsophisticated chemical synthesis. Since select plants contain the enzymatic machinery necessary to produce specialized compounds, tissue cultures can be used to achieve key transformations for large-scale chemical and/or pharmaceutical applications. In this context, plant tissue-culture bio-transformations have demonstrated great promise in the preparation of pharmaceutical products. This review describes the capacity of cultured plant cells to transform terpenoid natural products and the specific application of such transformations over the past three decades (1988-2019).
Keywords: Pharmaceutical products; Terpenoid; active natural product derivatives; enzymatic biotransformations; natural metabolites; plant cell cultures.