Abstract
Many commodities are abundantly produced around the world, including soybean, corn, rice sugarcane, cassava, coffee, fruits, and many others. These productions are responsible for the generation of enormous amounts of daily residues, such as cassava and sugarcane bagasses, rice husk, and coffee peel. These residues are rich sources for renewable energy and can be used as substrates for industrial interest products. Microorganisms are useful biofactories, capable of producing important primary and secondary metabolites, including alcohol, enzymes, antibiotics, pigments, and many other molecules. The production of pigments was reported in bacteria, filamentous fungi, yeasts, and algae. These natural microbial pigments are very promising because synthetic colorants present a long history of allergies and toxicity. In addition, many natural pigments present other biological activities, such as antioxidant and antimicrobial activities, that are interesting for industrial applications. The use of inexpensive substrates for the production of these metabolites is very attractive, considering that agro-industrial residues are generated in high amounts and usually are a problem to the industry. Therefore, in this article we review the production of microbial pigments using agro-industrial residues during the current decade (2010–2020), considering both submerged and solid state fermentations, wild-type and genetically modified microorganisms, laboratorial to large-scale bioprocesses, and other possible biological activities related to these pigments.
Highlights
Color has major importance in human activities
Microbial pigments are forefront in colorant development due to their independence from weather conditions, considerable assortment of shades, fast growth, and substrate-dependent cost effectiveness, characteristics considered to be superior in comparison to plant and animalsourced pigments (Lopes et al, 2013; Panesar et al, 2015)
We review the current literature on microbial pigment production using agro-industrial residues as substrates, encompassing the last decade (2010–2020)
Summary
Color has major importance in human activities. From traffic signals to arts and clothing, color has multiple cultural meanings. Recovery of high value-added components from the waste and their re-utilization as food additives or therapeutics are another interesting aspect to valorize these agro-industrial residues, we will not focus on FIGURE 1 | Chemical structure of some representative microbial pigments. We restricted our selection to focus on the microorganisms that can produce pigments in an inexpensive manner using agro-industrial residues that are alternatives to decrease the costs of production During this decade, there were several works using waste as substrate, the sole substrate or supplemented with nutrients. Some genetic studies were published, currently modifying genes, eliminating non-essential genes of filamentous
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