A. Alfermann, H. Spieler, E. Reinhard
1985
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Abstract
The production of valuable plant products by biotransformation from inexpensive precursors which cannot be transformed effectively by chemical or microbial means is an interesting field for practical application of plant cell cultures (Reinhard and Alfermann 1980). Among the reactions observed biotransformation by cardiac glycosides is of special pharmaceutical importance because these are widely used in medicine for treatment of heart diseases. Digitoxin and digoxin and their derivatives which can be extracted from leaves of Digitalis lanata, are the most interesting ones. Nowadays, digitoxin is used in therapy to a lesser extent than digoxin due to special pharmacological characteristics. D. lanata plants, however, always contain substantial amounts of digitoxin, up to about one quarter as compared to the amount of digoxin. Digoxin differs from digitoxin only by an additional hydroxyl function at C-12 (Fig. 1). Undifferentiated cell cultures of Digitalis do not produce cardiac glycosides, however they are able to perform special biotransformation reactions on substrates added into the medium (Reinhard et al. 1975).