Key Laboratory of Photosynthesis and Environmental Molecular Physiology, Institute of Botany, The Chinese Academy of Sciences, Nanxincun 20, Haidian District, Beijing, 100093, China.
Plant Cell Rep. 2011 May;30(5):689-94. doi: 10.1007/s00299-010-0967-9. Epub 2010 Dec 24.
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.
青蒿素是从中药青蒿（Artemisia annua L.）中分离得到的一种倍半萜内酯，是一种有效的抗疟药物，特别是对耐多药和脑型疟疾。迄今为止，青蒿仍然是青蒿素的唯一商业来源。青蒿中青蒿素的浓度较低，植物干重的 0.01%至 0.8%，这使得青蒿素相对昂贵，难以满足每年超过 1 亿个疗程的青蒿素为基础的联合治疗的需求。由于目前青蒿素的化学合成在商业上不可行，因此另一种降低青蒿素类抗疟药物价格的有前途的方法是对植物进行代谢工程改造，以获得转基因植物中更高含量的青蒿素。在过去的十年中，我们已经建立了青蒿的农杆菌介导的转化系统，并已成功将一些与青蒿素生物合成相关的基因转入该植物。本文综述了这些工作的各个方面。
