Abstract
Carotenoids are the pigments present in plants, animals, and microorganisms which are responsible for a broad variety of colors found in nature. Their capacity as antioxidants mainly established their marketable success as health, food, and feed supplements, and cosmetics components. Currently, chemical synthesis dominates the worldwide market; however, due to the high biological value of natural carotenoids, the production scheme is moving towards microbial production as a profitable alternative.
Highlights
The simplest way to understand what carotenoids are is to look for colors in living organisms in a natural environment
The screening of new producers of carotenoids, the development of fermentation processes or the use of genetic engineering or synthetic biology methodologies mark this fifth period [3,31,32,33]
Photosynthesis is a process where carotenoids are involved as working photoprotectors of the photosynthetic molecules, extending the range of light absorbed by photosynthetic systems
Summary
The simplest way to understand what carotenoids are is to look for colors in living organisms in a natural environment Those reddish, orange, or yellowish pigments observed in living (micro)organisms are mainly carotenoids. 722 organisms have been described as the source of the 1204 natural carotenoids currently defined in the Carotenoid DataBase (http://carotenoiddb.jp (accessed on updated: September 2020)) [6,7] They are naturally produced by photosynthetic species (plants, algae, and cyanobacteria), some groups of fungi and some nonphotosynthetic bacteria [4,8,9]. The center panel presents of the common car ers (fungi, algae, center and bacteria) and the structure of a xanthophyll (upper: canthaxanthin) and a carotene (lower: β-carotene).
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