Editorial: Biotechnology of plant secondary metabolites: Phytochemical biopharming as a sustainable contribution to a high-tech bioeconomy

Plant cell and tissue culture has made a great contribution to the advance of knowledge in plant biotechnology (Altman 2019). Today thousands of biotech companies distributed around the world produce millions of micropropagated plants, contributing to certified seed programs of a wide spectrum of commercial varieties for the agricultural, forestry and food industries. However, the biotechnological production of secondary metabolites has lagged behind the previously mentioned advances in translational plant biotechnology. So much so that with current developments in cell biology, cell, tissue and plant cultures are considered tools that should promote the use of plant biodiversity as an essential biotechnological resource focused on the production of natural phytocompounds for a wide spectrum of applications (Pasdaran and Hamedi 2017; Ochatt et al., 2022)