171 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
S. Malik (ed.), Exploring Plant Cells for the Production of Compounds of
Interest, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58271-5_7
Biotechnological Production of Antistress
Compounds: Current Status and Future
Prospects
Sanghamitra Nayak, Asit Ray, Ambika Sahoo, Sudipta Jena,
and Jeetendranath Patnaik
Abstract Stress and stress-related disorders are a major cause of diseases in mod-
ern times and contribute to around 75% of all illness. Recently antistress compounds
(adaptogens) from plants have been gaining increasing attention due to their ability
to attenuate stress effects. They regulate the immune response and the hormonal
changes due to stress, thereby maintaining homeostasis. In the present review, some
of the active constituents of adaptogenic plants, such as phenylpropanoid deriva-
tives (rosin, rosavin, syringin, triandrin; salidroside, tyrosol), tetracyclic triterpenes
(gingenosides, sitoindosides), and lignans (eleutherosides, schisandrin B), are dis-
cussed. Increasing demand for antistress compounds and their limited availability
from natural resources due to overexploitation has necessitated their biotechnologi-
cal production as an attractive alternative. This review summarizes various biotech-
nological approaches such as optimization of tissue culture conditions, elicitation,
Agrobacterium-mediated transformation, and metabolic engineering using micro-
bial systems for production of antistress compounds. Bioreactor cultures and vari-
ous parameters that would enhance the biomass and accumulation of some antistress
compounds are thoroughly discussed. Future research should focus on the identif-
cation of additional functional enzymes that are involved in their biosynthesis as
well as product scale-up of antistress compounds for industrial applications.
Keywords Antistress compounds · Bioreactors · Biotransformation · Elicitor ·
Metabolic engineering · Plant cell culture
S. Nayak (*) · A. Ray · A. Sahoo · S. Jena
Centre for Biotechnology, Siksha ‘O’ Anusandhan (Deemed to be University),
Bhubaneswar, Odisha, India
J. Patnaik
Department of Botany, Sri Krushna Chandra Gajapati Autonomous College,
Paralakhemundi, Odisha, India