Economic Considerations about Plant Cells

Plants are a valuable source of ingredients used in foods, therapeutics, cosmetics, health maintenance products, and a host of other applications. The value of plants to satisfy specific needs is being newly-discovered as well as rediscovered. For a variety of reasons,
to be discussed, plant cell and tissue culture could be preferred, or is non-preferred, as a source for particular food ingredient products. The needs and characteristics of commercial product targets and regulatory requirements should be understood early in development.
Deriving adequate technology, scaling it up, and resolving large-scale production difficulties involve requirements which must be met for the plant cell tissue culture source/product to be sufficiently advantageous over competitive alternatives. Specific
examples of applications and economic modeling are used to demonstrate analysis of the interplay between technical and business factors critical to developing a food ingredient product manufactured using plant cell and tissue culture.

Source: Goldstein W.E. (1999) Economic Considerations for Food Ingredients Produced by Plant Cell and Tissue Culture. In: Fu TJ., Singh G., Curtis W.R. (eds) Plant Cell and Tissue Culture for the Production of Food Ingredients. Springer, Boston, MA

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