Role of biotechnology in alkaloids production

Medicinal plants contain special chemical compounds in their leaves, stems, and roots and were used thousands of years ago for the purpose of some therapeutic uses. Medicinal plants serve as a huge reservoir for a large variety of bioactive compounds, which considered of very high value as pharmaceutical products. Many plants produce very important pharmaceutical compounds known as alkaloids. Alkaloids usually produced by variety of plants showing a great potential to be purified in relatively large quantities using new advanced techniques in the area of plant biotechnology. Alkaloids are chemical compounds that are characterized by having nitrogen atom in their structures. They are large group of chemicals divided into several categories, such as true alkaloids, protoalkaloid, polyamine alkaloids, peptide and cyclopeptide alkaloids, and pseudoalkaloids. One of the main challenges in the area of alkaloid investigation is how to be produced on the commercial scale and their characterization to be used as very useful therapeutic and pharmaceutical compounds. In order to achieve this, researchers turned to concentrate on the role of new biotechnology methods for synthesizing and characterizing of pharmaceutically important alkaloids. The great development that has happened in recent years in the field of biotechnology and molecular biology made it easy and convenient for transferring and propagating genes in plant cells for the purpose of commercially produce alkaloid related drugs. Number of techniques were developed and proved to be very useful and practical in synthesizing pharmaceutical alkaloids from plants. This chapter provides very important information about pharmaceutical alkaloids and discusses the importance of alkaloids as pharmaceutical and the role of new biotechnology approaches in synthesizing and producing alkaloids in commercial and industrial scale. This chapter is also discussed the new advanced techniques of plant biotechnology, including tissue culture of plant cell, genetic transformation, metabolic engineering, and microbial synthesis of alkaloids.