Amerstem has developed PhytoStemix™, a unique technology that answers the demand for large-scale plant biomass growth with minimum resource depletion and creates novel eco-sustainable plant sources to address unmet needs in nutrition, health, crop protection, and personal care. This is a green technology platform that saves energy, water and land resources, while preserving high-value flora with minimal waste production. Thus, the eco-sustainability of PhytoStemix allows significant expansion of high-value plant biomass while preserving plant species in their natural ecological niches.
developing planet friendly solutions
Technology
A unique and sustainable platform
Expanding plant biomass
under controlled laboratory conditions
Our proprietary PhytoStemix technology represents a unique array of technical innovations of a plant cell culture system known as “hairy roots”. Hairy roots (HR) represent unique structures that arise when plants have been exposed to Agrobacterium rhizogenes, a naturally-occurring bacteria that normally resides in the soil.
As a result of this natural interaction in the soil, the plant experiences a sustained change in morphology characterized by the emergence of hair-like root structures, which markedly increases the mass of plant tissue (biomass), hence the name “hairy roots”.
When this process takes place under aseptic and controlled laboratory conditions, the result is a “hairy root” culture, which is biomass characterized by notable metabolic stability in terms of the phytochemicals produced. This HR biomass is also virtually hormone-independent, which means that, in contrast to other type of cultures that require the addition of exogenous plant hormones, HR cultures do not as they produce their own natural plant hormones to sustain further biomass growth.
The HR culture approach offers enormous potential for the production of valuable secondary metabolites and enzymes with a variety of industrial or therapeutic applications. However, a major limitation until now has been the design and scale-up of adequate bioreactors that promote, not only growth and expansion of biomass, but also the stable production of high-value phytochemicals.
We have developed a novel approach to HR cultures encompassing innovations not only in the design of the bioreactors, but also in the hairy root induction process, the culture and environmental conditions, and perhaps most importantly, a proprietary method to stimulate continuous growth of hairy root biomass in an ageotropic fashion, i.e., in every possible direction and not dominated by Earth’s gravity, thereby resulting in maximal biomass accretion.
Maximizing plant potential
We are continuously expanding the enormous potential that plants offer by developing state-of-the-art research and technology tools needed for next-generation agricultural, pharmaceutical, crop protection, and personal care products.
Protecting our planet
Our technologies are designed with a view to dramatically reduce the requirements for land and water compared to traditional agriculture. Our solutions are not only more energy-efficient but also more economic.
Keeping our planet clean
Our R&D platform focuses on green technologies that minimize use of organic solvent and waste disposal costs. We develop biomass expansion technologies with negligible carbon footprint.
