Mulberry cell cultures: a promising source for health care

Plants have long been exploited as a sustainable source of food and chemicals; however, with the increasing global world population and the climate change ending in losses of biodiversity and land, conventional agriculture unlikely can cope with the huge challenges head. These factors could be countered using new and ethically more justifiable technologies such as plant cellular agriculture, a biotechnological tool for the production of nutritious and healthy ingredients, as well as single bioactive compounds (Rischer et al., 2020; Gubser et al., 2021; Bapat et al., 2023). Given the importance of Morus alba L. in many traditional medicines due to its health benefits (Chen et al., 2021), the aim of this work was to establish M. alba in vitro cell cultures to study their phytochemistry and potential use for nutritional and healthy supplements. Different organs from in vitro grown plantlets were used as explant source, and different basal media were tested. The best callogenesis was obtained from stem explants cultured on MS basal medium supplemented with sucrose and 2,4-D. During the following subcultures, the calli resulted in a brownish, juicy, grainy biomass. Considering that in vitro cell metabolism can change during the growth cycle, the phytochemical profile (HPLC-DAD), total phenol and flavonoid content and antioxidant activity (colorimetric assays) were analyzed on the juices obtained by squeezing the biomasses at: initial, mid and stationary phase of the growth cycle. The high content of phenols and flavonoids, as well as the antioxidant activity, showed an active metabolism of the culture.