scholarly journals Agro-Industrial Residues: Eco-Friendly and Inexpensive Substrates for Microbial Pigments Production

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fernanda Cortez Lopes ◽  
Rodrigo Ligabue-Braun

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.

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 637
Author(s):  
Ramesh Chatragadda ◽  
Laurent Dufossé

Microbial pigments play multiple roles in the ecosystem construction, survival, and fitness of all kinds of organisms. Considerably, microbial (bacteria, fungi, yeast, and microalgae) pigments offer a wide array of food, drug, colorants, dyes, and imaging applications. In contrast to the natural pigments from microbes, synthetic colorants are widely used due to high production, high intensity, and low cost. Nevertheless, natural pigments are gaining more demand over synthetic pigments as synthetic pigments have demonstrated side effects on human health. Therefore, research on microbial pigments needs to be extended, explored, and exploited to find potential industrial applications. In this review, the evolutionary aspects, the spatial significance of important pigments, biomedical applications, research gaps, and future perspectives are detailed briefly. The pathogenic nature of some pigmented bacteria is also detailed for awareness and safe handling. In addition, pigments from macro-organisms are also discussed in some sections for comparison with microbes.


Foods ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 67
Author(s):  
Samo Lešnik ◽  
Urban Bren

Rosemary (Rosmarinus officinalis L.) represents a medicinal plant known for its various health-promoting properties. Its extracts and essential oils exhibit antioxidative, anti-inflammatory, anticarcinogenic, and antimicrobial activities. The main compounds responsible for these effects are the diterpenes carnosic acid, carnosol, and rosmanol, as well as the phenolic acid ester rosmarinic acid. However, surprisingly little is known about the molecular mechanisms responsible for the pharmacological activities of rosemary and its compounds. To discern these mechanisms, we performed a large-scale inverse molecular docking study to identify their potential protein targets. Listed compounds were separately docked into predicted binding sites of all non-redundant holo proteins from the Protein Data Bank and those with the top scores were further examined. We focused on proteins directly related to human health, including human and mammalian proteins as well as proteins from pathogenic bacteria, viruses, and parasites. The observed interactions of rosemary compounds indeed confirm the beforementioned activities, whereas we also identified their potential for anticoagulant and antiparasitic actions. The obtained results were carefully checked against the existing experimental findings from the scientific literature as well as further validated using both redocking procedures and retrospective metrics.


2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (7) ◽  
pp. 186 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ramesh ◽  
Vinithkumar ◽  
Kirubagaran ◽  
Venil ◽  
Dufossé

Microbial oddities such as versatile pigments are gaining more attention in current research due to their widely perceived applications as natural food colorants, textiles, antimicrobial activities, and cytotoxic activities. This indicates that the future generation will depend on microbial pigments over synthetic colorants for sustainable livelihood. Although several reviews have detailed the comprehensive applications of microbial pigments extensively, knowledge on several aspects of pigmented microbes is apparently missing and not properly reviewed anywhere. Thus, this review has been made to provide overall knowledge on biodiversity, distribution, pathogenicity, and ecological and industrial applications of microbial pigments as well as their challenges and future directions for food, industrial, and biomedical applications. Meticulously, this compendious review treatise on the pigments from bacteria, fungi, yeasts, and microalgae includes reports from the 1970s to 2018. A total of 261 pigment compounds produced by about 500 different microbial species are included, and their bioactive nature is described.


2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (10) ◽  
pp. e316101018925
Author(s):  
Micael Estevão Pereira de Oliveira ◽  
Wildson Max Barbosa da Silva ◽  
Daniela Ribeiro Alves ◽  
João Batista de Andrade Neto ◽  
Selene Maia de Morais ◽  
...  

The food colors are, in many countries, widely used to give food increased visual sensory quality, aiming, thus, the growth of the consumer market. Aware of this, the present work aimed to reevaluate the general properties of synthetic food dyes and natural pigments, the latter being generally used to replace the former. Then, the current analysis was based on the search for the strategy, selection of articles (with inclusion and exclusion criteria), eligibility, and data extraction. Thus, it was observed in studies that synthetic food dyes may cause several harmful effects to human health, among them, genetic damage and carcinogenicity. On the other hand, the use of natural pigments as an alternative to replace food dyes has been increasingly present in studies, presenting qualities that, previously, were not known, as is the case of anthocyanins, which have important physiological and ecological functions. It is also important to point out that the use of natural pigments goes beyond the limits of food, and are also found as sensitizers for solar cells, tissues, and medicines. Selected articles (47) leaded to a total of 72 distinct pieces of information, focused mainly on the biological activities and involving natural dyes and pigments. In short, the gradual replacement of dyes, currently used, still in large scale in some locations, by natural pigments, is already part of our present, allowing the creation of a future perspective with the production of processed foods without the damage that most of synthetic dyes produce to the human body.


Agronomy ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (5) ◽  
pp. 830
Author(s):  
Abdelrahim H. A. Hassan ◽  
Mohammad K. Okla ◽  
Saud S. Al-amri ◽  
Mohamed A. El-Tayeb ◽  
Ihab M. Moussa ◽  
...  

Elevated atmospheric CO2 (eCO2) can significantly enhance plant metabolism and improve their nutritional quality. Although several studies addressed the effect of eCO2 on plants, to our knowledge, there are no studies that have applied eCO2 to improve growth, chemical composition, and biological properties of ajwain (Trachyspermum ammi) during sprouting. Herein, eCO2 (620 µmol mol−1) was employed to enhance photosynthetic reactions. Improved photosynthesis induced primary and bioactive secondary metabolism, which led to improved biological activities of T. ammi sprouts in comparison with control sprouts and seeds. eCO2-treated sprouts showed significantly (p < 0.05) higher levels of most measured nutritional primary and secondary metabolites like soluble sugars, essential amino acids, organic acids, essential oils, phenolics, and flavonoids than control sprouts, which had significantly higher values than control seeds. eCO2 significantly improved the antimicrobial properties of T. ammi sprouts against 11 out of 13 microbial species than control sprouts, which had more potent antimicrobial activities than seeds. The significant increase in the antioxidant potential of treated sprouts was indicated by improved levels of ferric reducing antioxidant power (FRAP), DPPH, and oxygen radical absorbance capacity (ORAC). In addition, the anticancer activity against four different human tumor cell lines was significantly (p < 0.05) boosted by both sprouting and eCO2 exposure. Thus, the present study confirms the synergistic effect of sprouting with eCO2 exposure as promising approaches to produce ajwain sprouts with rich nutraceuticals, effective phytochemicals, and enhanced biological activities.


1996 ◽  
pp. 4-15
Author(s):  
S. Golovaschenko ◽  
Petro Kosuha

The report is based on the first results of the study "The History of the Evangelical Christians-Baptists in Ukraine", carried out in 1994-1996 by the joint efforts of the Department of Religious Studies at the Institute of Philosophy of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and the Odessa Theological Seminary of Evangelical Christian Baptists. A large-scale description and research of archival sources on the history of evangelical movements in our country gave the first experience of fruitful cooperation between secular and church researchers.


1984 ◽  
Vol 16 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 281-295 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald C Gordon

Large-scale tidal power development in the Bay of Fundy has been given serious consideration for over 60 years. There has been a long history of productive interaction between environmental scientists and engineers durinn the many feasibility studies undertaken. Up until recently, tidal power proposals were dropped on economic grounds. However, large-scale development in the upper reaches of the Bay of Fundy now appears to be economically viable and a pre-commitment design program is highly likely in the near future. A large number of basic scientific research studies have been and are being conducted by government and university scientists. Likely environmental impacts have been examined by scientists and engineers together in a preliminary fashion on several occasions. A full environmental assessment will be conducted before a final decision is made and the results will definately influence the outcome.


2020 ◽  
Vol 18 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Singh ◽  
L. Ronsard ◽  
M. Pandey ◽  
R. Kapoor ◽  
V.G. Ramachandran ◽  
...  

Background: HIV-1 Nef is an important accessory protein with multiple effector functions. Genetic studies of HIV-1 Nef gene shows extensive genetic diversity and the functional studies have been carried out mostly with Nef derived from regions dominated by subtype B (North America & Europe). Objective: This study was carried out to characterize genetic variations of the Nef gene from HIV-1 infected individuals from North-India and to find out their functional implications. Methods: The unique representative variants were sub-cloned in eukaryotic expression vector and further characterized with respect to their ability to down regulate cell surface expression of CD4 and MHC-1molecules. Results: The phylogenetic analysis of Nef variants revealed sequence similarity with either consensus subtype B or B/C recombinants. Boot scan analysis of some of our variants showed homology to B/C recombinant and some to wild type Nef B. Extensive variations were observed in most of the variants. The dN/dS ratio revealed 80% purifying selection and 20% diversifying selection implying the importance of mutations in Nef variants. Intracellular stability of Nef variants differed greatly when compared with wild type Nef B and C. There were some variants that possessed mutations in the functional domains of Nef and responsible for its differential CD4 and MHC-1 down regulation activity. Conclusion: We observed enhanced biological activities in some of the variants, perhaps arising out of amino acid substitutions in their functional domains. The CD4 and MHC-1 down-regulation activity of Nef is likely to confer immense survival advantage allowing the most rare genotype in a population to become the most abundant after a single selection event.


2020 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adinath D. Badar ◽  
Shubham M. Sulakhe ◽  
Mahesh B. Muluk ◽  
Naziya N. M. A. Rehman ◽  
Prashant P. Dixit ◽  
...  

Background: Thiosemicarbazone, 1,2,3-triazole and their derivatives received great pharmaceutical importance due to their prominent biological activities. In the present study, the molecular hybrid thiosemicarbazone-1,2,3-triazoles derivatives were synthesized and screened for their antimicrobial activities. Methods: A series of thiosemicarbazone clubbed with 1,2,3-triazole derivatives were synthesized via click chemistry approach in good yields. The structures of synthesized compounds were assigned by their spectral data. The in vitro antimicrobial activity was performed by the agar well diffusion method. A molecular docking study was performed to identify the possible mode of action of synthesized derivatives. Results: The compounds 5d, 5h, 5i and 5k have exhibited excellent antimicrobial activities against both antibacterial and antifungal pathogens. The active thiosemicarbazone-1,2,3-triazole derivatives have shown excellent binding affinity towards DNA gyrase. Conclusion: The molecular hybrid thiosemicarbazone-1,2,3-triazole derivatives were synthesized. The newly synthesized compounds were evaluated for their antimicrobial activities. Few of the thiosemicarbazone-1,2,3-triazoles derivatives have exhibited good antimicrobial activities. They have been shown excellent binding affinity towards DNA gyrase.


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