Fermentative Production Of New Carotenoid

Carotenoids belong to the terpene species which have many conjugated carbon-carbon doublebonds. Carotenoids are widely used in foods, feeds, cosmetics, and pharmaceuticals due to thefollow biological functions: 1) colour depositor, 2) vitamin A precursor, 3) sacavenger and/orquencher of singlet oxygen, 4) anti-tumor promoter 5) enhancer of in vitro antibody production andso on. In the present paper, the isolation and identification of a new and undetermined carotenoidproduced by a bacterium were carried out. The main works included the follows:1 A bacterial strain producting carotenoids was primarily identified. The phylogenetic analysisbased on 16SrDNA showed that the strain was close to Pseudomonas sp. with 99% sequenceidentity. However on the basis of its morphological and biochemical characteristics, the strainshould be classified into Micrococcus Roseus which has not nosogenesis for human andpropagation.2 The culture medium and fermentation conditions were optimized. The results showed that thecarotenoids production was greatly affected by carbon and nitrogen sources. The optimizedfermentation medium contained sucrose 30g/L, peptone 7g/L, Na2HPO4 1.0g/L. The biomass andtotal carotenoids concentrtations could reach 13.46 mg/mL and 7.66 mg/L after 120 hours underthe optimal conditions.3 A facile and effective method of disrupting cells and extracting carotenoids was determined.Silica gel column chromatography, semi-preparative HPLC and reverse-phase C18 columnchromatography were used to purify the target carotenoid.4 The qualitative analysis for the target product was established by special chemical experimentsand a series of optical experiments. Based on UV-visible, IR, HPLC, APCI-mass spectra thecarotenoid was identified as a new carotenoid. This carotenoid has never been isolated before. Itsmolecular was 536 and molecular formula was C40H56. Based on our data, the structure of thenew carotenoid was identified, and the result showed that it has 12 conjugated carbon-carbondouble bonds, 8 alkyl substitutes.5 The effects of light, oxide and temperature on the new carotenoid were also studied.