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Metabolic engineering of artemisinin biosynthesis in Artemisia annua L.

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Abstract

Artemisinin, a sesquiterpene lactone isolated from the Chinese medicinal plant Artemisia annua L., is an effective antimalarial agent, especially for multi-drug resistant and cerebral malaria. To date, A. annua is still the only commercial source of artemisinin. The low concentration of artemisinin in A. annua, ranging from 0.01 to 0.8% of the plant dry weight, makes artemisinin relatively expensive and difficult to meet the demand of over 100 million courses of artemisinin-based combinational therapies per year. Since the chemical synthesis of artemisinin is not commercially feasible at present, another promising approach to reduce the price of artemisinin-based antimalarial drugs is metabolic engineering of the plant to obtain a higher content of artemisinin in transgenic plants. In the past decade, we have established an Agrobacterium-mediated transformation system of A. annua, and have successfully transferred a number of genes related to artemisinin biosynthesis into the plant. The various aspects of these efforts are discussed in this review.

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Acknowledgments

The authors thank Dr. Da-Hua CHEN, Dr. Sa GENG, Dr. Jun-Li HAN, Dr. Huahong WANG, Dr. Chenfei MA and Dr. Dongming MA for their contributions. These researches were supported by the National High-tech R&D Program (863) of the Ministry of Sciences and Technology, China (2007AA021501); the Knowledge Innovation Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (KSCX2-SW-329); the National Natural Science Foundation of China (30672623, 60773164, 30470153).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory of Photosynthesis and Environmental Molecular Physiology, Institute of Botany, The Chinese Academy of Sciences, Nanxincun 20, Haidian District, Beijing, 100093, China

    Benye Liu, Hong Wang, Zhigao Du, Guofeng Li & Hechun Ye

  2. Institute of Pharmaceutical Biology, Technical University Braunschweig, Mendelssohnstr. 1, 38106, Braunschweig, Germany

    Benye Liu

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  1. Benye Liu
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  2. Hong Wang
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  3. Zhigao Du
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  4. Guofeng Li
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  5. Hechun Ye
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Correspondence to Hechun Ye.

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Communicated by R. Reski.

A contribution to the Special Issue: Plant Biotechnology in Support of the Millennium Development Goals.

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Liu, B., Wang, H., Du, Z. et al. Metabolic engineering of artemisinin biosynthesis in Artemisia annua L.. Plant Cell Rep 30, 689–694 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00299-010-0967-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00299-010-0967-9

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