Safety Considerations for Plant Cell Cultures

Plant cell and tissue culture (PCTC) offers an alternative source for the controlled and consistent production of 'natural' food ingredients. PCTC has been used to produce various products including flavors, colorants, essential oils, and more recently, "nutraceuticals". Many of the cell lines used to produce food ingredients come from plant families known to produce a variety of toxins or anti-nutritional agents including alkaloids, phytoestrogens, tannins, etc. Tomato and potato cell cultures were chosen as model systems for this study. Both tomato and potato are among the most consumed foods in the world and their cell cultures have been frequently used as model systems to study somaclonal variations and effects of processing conditions on secondary metabolite production. The HPLC method of Friedman et al. (1994) was adopted with modifications to determine the amount of a-tomatine in tomatoes and tomato cell cultures. The extraction and clean-up procedures were effective in removing interfering peaks. a-Tomatine was not detected in either the callus or the cell suspension cultures of Lycopersicon esculentum cv. Roma VFNT-Cherry which have been in culture for more than 10 years. Changes in lighting conditions did not activate the production of a-tomatine in these cultures. Attempts were made to initiate potato and tomato cell cultures. Potato callus culture was successfully established from explants of the tubers of Solanum tuberosum cv. Yukon Gold and grown in a modified MS medium containing 10 mg/L of NAA.