Novel Sources of Natural Colourants

Microbial sources

Production of materials by microbial cultures has several advantages. The rapid growth of microbes cuts the production time to a matter of days and the process lends itself to a continuous operation. Compared to plant or animal sources, the production is flexible and can easily be controlled. Microbes produce a variety of colourants such as chlorophyll and carotenoids as well as some unique pigments. By incorporating suitable genetic material into selected microbes (recombinant DNA technology), it may be possible to produce pigments of choice, both qualitative  and quantitative approaches.