With the advance of biotechnology, research on plant tissue cultures is becoming more active not only in academic institutions but also in industry. From an economical point of view, there are at least three applications of this field; plant breeding, useful metabolite production and micropropagation. Except for micropropagation through tissue culture, it has been thought that the two other objectives take too long a time to contribute to industry. However, as seen in shikonin derivative production, the industrial application of this technology to manufacture metabolites seems likely to be realized in the near future although there are still some problems.