Study On Production Of CoenzymeQ₁₀ With Mucor Racemosus Solid Fermentation

CoenzymeQ10 (CoQ10) is an important physiologicically active compound. It plays a crucial role in organisms as an electron shuttle of the mitochondrial respiratory chain. It is widely used in medicine, hygienic food and cosmetics industries as natural antioxidant and cell metabolism activator. The production of CoQ10 with Mucor racemosus solid fermentation is studied in this work. The culture medium of the somatic fermentation, the fermentation conditions as well as the relationship between somatic growth and production of CoQ10 are investigated, while the purification of CoQ10 is conducted subsequently.Alcohol-base Saponification method and Thin-layer Chromatography method are used to produce CoQ10 from the extract. Then qualitative and quantitative investigations are performed with Ultraviolet Absorption Spectra and High Performance Liquid Chromatography method. The qualitative analysis result shows that Mucor racemosus produces CoQ10. The quantitative analysis result shows that TLC-UV spectrophotometry is a fast and accurate method of CoQ10 determination, with a RSD of 1.0% and an average thin-plate recovery percent of 89.8%.The solid fermentation of Mucor racemosus is studied. And the optimum culture medium is obtained as follows:m(wheat bran):m(bean bran) equals 8:2; Water content in the culture medium is 0.90 mL·g-1; And the original pH is about 5.5; The culture temperature and culture time are 29℃and 82 hours, respectively; The input of inorganic salts per gram of dry medium are, respectively,3mg of MgSO4·7H2O,0.3mg of FeSO4·7H2O and 0.25mg of MnSO4·7H2O; And the input of natural materials per gram of dry medium are, respectively,0.10ml of carrot juice,0.05ml of tomato juice and 0.40ml of soybean oil. Under these conditions stated above, the production of CoQ10 reaches 0.652mg per gram of dry medium.The relationship between the somatic growth process and the production of CoQ10 is studied. And the results show that during the process of solid fermentation, the production of CoQ10 and the growth of Mucor racemosus are coupled. Namely, the somatic biomass and the amount of CoQ10 production will increase consistently with increasing fermentation time. When it is cultivated for 82 hours, the somatic biomass and the amount of CoQ10 will reach the maximum value.A relatively considerable amount of dissociation and purification of the mucor racemosus crude extract are conducted using silica-gel column. The volume ratio of ligroin to ether equals 20:3. And when the silica-gel column diameter is 2cm, the input of crude extract is 3.5mL and the bed volume is 1.5cm high along the column axis, the average recovery percent would be 75%. Incidentally, the average recovery percent would increase slightly with increasing column diameter.