Study On Extraction, Separation And Antioxidant Activities Of Rhodotorular Glutinis Pigments

The carotenoids is a main kind of pigments in world ecosystem, it has been known as an important pigments which can be benefited for people's life, health and medical treatments. The -carotenoid is a typical carotenoids, which has been used as pigment and nutrition strengthener in food. In addition, it has excellent antioxidant activities which had been testified by many experiments.The Rhodotorular glutinis is a kind of epiphyte in simple configuration, it can produce many special carotenoids which is like torularhodin, -carotenoid, lycopene, astaxanthin et al. It is superior to other industrial microbe to produce carotenoids by Rhodotorular glutinisThe Rhodotorular glutinis thalli was used to research technics of extraction in this paper. In the experiment, three means of extraction, ultrasonic, microwave and soaking were compared in extracting effect. Finally, soaking with organic solvents was determined to be the optimal method, which described as follows: the optimal organic solvents was acetone, the optimal temperature was 35 C, the optimal time was 60min, the optimal material/liquid was l:30(m/v) and the optimal extracting grade was second grade.The pigments produced by Rhodotorular glutinis belonged to carotenoids. The stability of the pigments in different illumination, temperature, acid, oxidative and reductive situation was studied in this paper. The result showed that all these factors but the reducer can influence the stability in different degree, however the adding of reducer will improve it.In order to study the antioxidant activities of the pigments of Rhodotorular glutinis, the reducing power, the scavenging ability on hydroxyl radical and the inhibition ability on oxidation of liposome system Were tested. The experiments indicated that the pigments had strong capacity of scavenging hydroxyl radical and had commonly reducing power and the inhibition ability on oxidation of liposome system.At last, the pigments and its composition were separated and identified by TLC and HPLC, more than four components were separated and one of them could be -carotenoid.