The HR tissue from mother cultures is excised and further grown in plastic dishes until attaining sufficient size to be transferred to flasks with liquid culture media where they are propagated in suspension. Once they reach a critical size, the HR cultures can be transferred to proprietary scalable, modular bioreactors to produce large quantities of HR biomass. Alternatively, suspension HR cultures can be placed under special conditions to promote the formation of callus aggregates, which in turn can be used to generate many identical plants through micropropagation in the presence of appropriate plant hormones and growth factors. The resulting plant tissue (either HR biomass or micropropagated plants), as well as the conditioned culture media, are harvested and used to make extracts enriched in high-value phytochemicals (liquid or powder) or a recombinant protein of interest if the initial infection was performed with a strain of A. rhizogenes modified to include a recombinant gene as shown in Stage I.
