Marlia Singgih

Food Colorant from Microorganisms

Traditional processed food in Asia is famous worldwide. For many years, some fermentative food-grade color pigments produced by microorganisms have been used to enhance their appearance. In Asia, mostly in China, India, Japan, and Indonesia, although natural colorants extracted from vegetables and fruits, such as saffron, turmeric, and suji leaf, have been widely used as food colorants, microbial color pigment is now intensely studied to produce a high-standard, high-yield, and stable food colorant, for example, more stable against light and heat, and with a wider range of pH than the natural food colorants. Some examples of the pigment molecules are carotenoids, melanin, flavin, quinones, monascins, and xanthophylls. Colorant-producing microorganisms, such as , , , and , can produce a large number of color pigments (Table 1). They grow mostly in soil and some of them grow on coast or in deep sea.