Studies On The Determination And Fermentation Of The Functional Ingredients In Monascus Red Rice

The Monascus Red Rice (red koji) has always been considered as the edible andpharmaceutical products from of old. Monascus can produce so many metabolites. What arethe functional ingredients and their contents are unknown. How about the production of themby fermentation and the effects of fermentation conditions are also unclear. It is quitesignificant to look for them and make use of them. This paper mainly studied on the functionalingredients in red koji such as Monacolin K, Ergosterol, GABA and so on. Theirdeterminations, contents in domestic products, fermentation conditions and industrializationswere the emphases of this article.Firstly, we established the determination of ergosterol in red koji by HPLC .After that, weoptimized the determination of Monacolin K and GABA in red koji. Using thesedeterminations, we can determine these ingredients qualitatively and quantitatively.We determined the contents of Monacolin K, ergosterol and Polyunsaturated Fatty Acids indomestic products. The highest content of Monacolin K was about 10mg/g. The content ofergosterol was universally low, especially in the functional Monascus red rice. The reason maybe that Monacolin K can inhibit the biosynthesis of ergosterol. In addition, the content of aminoacids reached 95.98mg/g including 17 kinds of amino acid (except Trp). Furthermore, there were0.46mg/g calcium in red koji determined by Atomic Absorption Spectrometry. In the end, weidentified the content of PuFAs in red koji by GC-MS. The content of PuFAS took up 72 percent ofthe total fatty acids. The contents of PuFAs in samples collected from domestic plants were verysimilar to ours.We studied the fermentation conditions of Monascus to produce Monacolin K, ergosterol andGABA. Using Monascus 9908 as the production strain, the content of Monacolin K had beenimproved from 5.78mg/g to 11.20mg/g in the optimal fermentation conditions, which is higherthan domestic products. The content of GABA was 0.75 mg/g . Using Monascus SJS-20 as theproduction strain, the content of ergosterol was 8.12mg/g in the optimal fermentationconditions.The effects of fermentation conditions on Monacolin K, pigment and ergosterol producedby Monascus 9908 were studied. According to the results of two functional Monascus culturedon different material, we found that the content of ergosterol was lower when the content ofMonacolin K was higher. We can interpret these phenomena above through the biosynthesis ofMonacolin K , pigment and ergosterol supposed by us.We met some difficulties such as the control of temperature and humidity on the way toindustrialization. In accordance, we took a series of measures to solve these problems. Aboutthe contamination question which always exits in the course of solid state fermentation, wefished out some measures which had been set down as criterion in our plant.In conclusion, there are many functional ingredients in red koji besides Monacolin K,which are greatly influenced by the capability of Monascus and fermentation conditions.