Microbial colors (edited by Ayan Santra)

3. • Artificial or synthetic colors mostly used by the majority of
food processing and cosmetic industries.
• However, they are toxic. thus there is need to replace
synthetic pigments with natural pigments.
• Nature colored pigment can be obtained by organisms
including plants, animals and microorganisms.

4. • .Microbial Pigments: The natural pigments extracted from
microorganism are termed as “microbial pigments”.
Microorganism’s bacteria, algae and fungi produce variety of
pigments and therefore, are the promising source of food
colorants .

5. List of
pigment
producing
micro-
organisms

6. Starter Screening Methods
Raman spectrometer:
• Used for detecting pigments with the help of a 532 nm
excitation laser.
• can detectcarotenoids, bacterioruberin.
Mass spectrometry:
• can also be used for faster identification of pigment
producing fungal strains.
• HPLC, mass spectrometry, LCMS, nuclear magnetic
resonance (NMR), and UV-VIS spectra can be applied to
the rapid identification of known compounds

7.  Microbial pigments can be produced either by solid substrate
fermentation or by submerged fermentation.
 . In solid substrate fermentation (SSF), the microbial pigment
biomass occurs on the surface of a solid substrate for the
cultivation of microbial colour . This SSF technique has many
potential advantages including savings in waste water and
higher yield of the metabolites. On the other hand,
microorganisms are cultivated in liquid medium aerobically with
proper agitation to get homogenous growth of cells and media
components in submerged fermentation technique

8. advantages
• These pigments from biological or microbial sources
have desirable properties like stability to light heat and
pH 11.
• Microbial pigments possesses anti-cancer properties and
are a source of pro-Vitamin A.
• Microbial production has various benefits as their
production is independent to weather condition, easy
and fast with different colors uses.
• they can be produced under controlled condition in a
very less time.

9. Application of microbialcolors
• Pharmaceutical industry:
• Dairy industry
• Textile industry
• Printing industry
• Food colorants

10. current
• the current bacterial pigment productions are not
effective to meet their industrial needs. Current research
going on world over on bacterial pigments signify that
genetic engineering for strain improvement, optimization
of bioprocess modelling and utilizing cheap agro-
industrial residues as substrates are key developmental
strategies to maximize pigment production from bacteria.
Incidentally the superior performance characteristics of
the bacteria for producing differing colouring compounds
and the environmental acceptability of bacterial pigments
are very encouraging factors to promote higher pigment
production taking advantage of the current
developmental strategies.

11. Future Perspective:
• Microbial pigment production can be increased in huge
amount through genetic engineering. Production of
colours by fermentation has several advantages i.e.
cheaper production, probably easier extraction, higher
yields, and no seasonal variations with adequate raw
material. Many microbial pigments not only used as
colouring agents in food and cosmetic industry but also
act as anticancer, anti-inflammatory, anti-microbial and
anti-oxidant. Isolation of new microorganisms producing
colouring pigment can be an alternate source of
colorants used in foods, textile, pharma industry et

12. REFERENCES
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnut.2019.00007/full#B133
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4519520/
file:///C:/Users/jasmail/Downloads/Heider_2014_AMB-98-
4355_minireview_C50_carotenoids.pdf