Abstract—Presently, artemisinin is isolated from the shoots of Artemisia annua plant. However due to seasonal availability of the plant the supply of this drug is much lower than its demand. Alternative biotechnological protocols are, therefore, highly needed to supplement the supply of this drug. One such production protocol could be mass scale hairy root cultivations in carefully identified bioreactor. Hairy root were induced by the Agrobacterium rhizogenes mediated genetic transformation of in vitro grown plants of Artemisia annua. The hairy root propagation conditions were thereafter optimized to enhance the biomass and artemisinin accumulation which resulted in following cultivation and environmental conditions – rotational speed (70 rpm), temperature (25 °C), size of inoculum (1 g/l DW), age of inoculum (8 d) and medium to vessel volume ratio (0.18). Scale-up of the hairy root cultivation was thereafter performed in the stirred tank bioreactor for mass scale artemisinin production in an appropriate bioreactor configuration. Hairy root cultivation in stirred tank bioreactor cultivation resulted not only in high biomass accumulation of 6.3 g/l dry weight (37.50 g fresh weight) but also artemisinin content of 0.32 mg/g by using optimized media after 25 d of batch cultivation.

Index Terms—Artemisia annua, Artemisinin, hairy root culture, optimization, bioreactor, biomass.

Department of Biochemical Engineering and Biotechnology, IIT Delhi, Hauz Khas, New Delhi – 110016, India (email: ashokks@dbeb.iitd.ac.in).
Department of Biotechnology and Medical Engineering, National Institute of Technology Rourkela, Odisha, India - 769008.

Cite: Nivedita Patra, Ashok Kumar Srivastava, "Mass Scale Artemisinin Production in a Stirred Tank Bioreactor Using Hairy Roots of Artemisia Annua," International Journal of Bioscience, Biochemistry and Bioinformatics vol. 4, no. 6, pp. 467-474, 2014.