Hairy root culture
Hairy root culture, also called transformed root culture, is a type of plant tissue culture that is used to study plant metabolic processes or to produce valuable secondary metabolites or recombinant proteins, often with plant genetic engineering. A naturally occurring soil bacterium Agrobacterium rhizogenes that contains root-inducing plasmids (also called Ri plasmids) can infect plant roots and cause them to produce a food source for the bacterium, opines, and to grow abnormally.