RESEARCH INITIATION AWARD: PROTEIN ELICITATION OF SECONDARY METABOLITES IN CULTURED PLANT CELLS ABSTRACT This proposal attempts to: - determine the mechanism of elicitor activity by placing a recognized elicitor protein inside a cell and monitoring the cell's response, thereby bypassing the hypothesized polysaccharide receptor sites on the outer wall, and - evaluate the observation that tyrosine decarboxylase (TDC) levels correlate with synthesis of a secondary metabolite, berberine. The resulting data are to be used to develop kinetic models for growth rate, product synthesis and secretion rates which reflect the dependence on elicitor concentration. Until more detail is known regarding the metabolic control involved in secondary metabolite production, effective use of plant cell culture will be extremely difficult to achieve.
