Yudie Wang¹ , Meifang Li²

1 Traditional Chinese Medicine Research Center, Cuixi Academy of Biotechnology, Zhuji, 311800, Zhejiang, China
2 Tropical Medicinal Plant Research Center, Hainan Institute of Tropical Agricultural Resources, Sanya, 572025, Hainan, China
Author    Correspondence author
Medicinal Plant Research, 2025, Vol. 15, No. 5   doi: 10.5376/mpr.2025.15.0021
Received: 20 Jun., 2025    Accepted: 31 Jul., 2025    Published: 10 Sep., 2025

This is an open access article published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Ginseng (Panax ginseng C.A. Meyer), as a traditional Chinese medicinal material and an important economic crop, its main active components, ginsenosides and polysaccharides, have demonstrated pharmacological effects in terms of antioxidation, anti-inflammation, immune regulation and neuroprotection. This study systematically expounds the progress in the biosynthesis of ginsenosides and polysaccharides, including the roles of precursor substances and metabolic pathways, key rate-limiting enzymes, cytochrome P450 and glycosyltransferases in ginsenoside synthesis, as well as the regulation of polysaccharide synthetase and monosaccharide activation pathways in polysaccharide formation. The roles of transcription factors, signal transduction pathways and epigenetics in the regulation of synthetic pathways were further explored, and the applications of transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics in revealing key genes and metabolic networks were summarized. Synthetic biology and metabolic engineering have provided new ideas for the efficient production of saponins and polysaccharides, but there are still problems such as insufficient functional gene identification, incomplete pathway analysis, and restricted application transformation. In-depth research on the biosynthetic pathways of ginsenosides and polysaccharides is conducive to the efficient development and utilization of ginseng resources, and also provides a theoretical basis and technical support for the metabolic improvement of medicinal plants and the modernization of traditional Chinese medicine.

Ginseng; Ginsenosides; Polysaccharides; Biosynthetic pathways; Multi-omics