Harvesting specific plant metabolites from hairy root cultures using magnetized n

DESCRIPTION: Plants produce a wide variety of valuable bioactive metabolites, but these are commonly present in low concentrations in the wild-type plant. This makes the separation and purification of these compounds complicated and expensive. The applicant company, Naprogenix Inc, has developed a technology for increasing the yields of specific bioactive metabolites in mutant plant cell cultures, which promises to lessen this problem. However, the value of this, or any other approach using genetically-modified plant cells, is limited by the necessity of the wasteful destruction of the plant cells in order to extract the required products. The process would be more efficient if products could be harvested from cells in continuous culture. Nanoparticles aretaken up by cells by endocytosis, and subsequently exocytosed. They can also be engineered to adsorb specific chemicals. This suggests that specifically-engineered (functionalized and magnetized) nanoparticles could be used to repeatedly harvest sp