Studies on Red Pigment Produced by Penicillium Sp

In one or the other way life on earth depends on pigments like how plants prepare their own food with chlorophyll and oxygen carried in the body with hemoglobin (Britton, 1995). Pigments as coloring agents was used from prehistoric times, it was proven when pigments and grinding equipments were found in a cave at Twin Rivers, near Lusaka, Zambia between 350,000 and 400,000(Kassinger, 2003). Different parts of the world has been used the pigments. In Europe, it was practiced during the Bronze Age and in China, dyeing with plants, barks, and insects has been traced back more than 5,000 years. In India, it has being practiced from the Indus Valley period (2500 BC) (Gokhale et al., 2004; Aberoumand, 2011). Henna as natural coloring agent was used before 2500 BC, while saffron has been mentioned in the Bible (Gulrajani, 2001) In Egypt, the addition of color to food was started when candy makers added natural extracts to their candy. While in the Japan, the Nara period (8th century) in the shosoin text contains references to coloring soybean and adzuki-bean cakes (Aberoumand, 2011).

Mauvine, the first synthetic color was developed by Sir William Henry Perkin in 1856 and has started a revolution in the history of synthetic colorants (Walford, 1980). synthetic color market has rapidly revolutionized the industry due to its ease of production, less expensive, no unwanted flavors imparted to food, superior coloring properties, and only tiny amounts are needed to color anything. At the time sellers has offered more than 80 artificial coloring agents and many color additives which has not tested for their toxicity or other adverse effects, which ultimately led to adverse effects on the health and environment (Downham and Collins, 2000) Synthetic dyes like tartrazine, cochineal red, and sunset yellow individually or in combination provoke allergies.

Although, Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved some of the synthetic colorants for use in foods, pharmaceuticals, and cosmetic preparations were later found to promote cancer. Due to their apparent hazards some synthetic dyes have even been withdrawn from external use for example, benzidine dyes cause bowel cancer, while carbon black (widely used as printing ink pigment) is thought to be a potential carcinogen.

The unethical discharge of untreated industrial dye effluents produce toxins and persist for long time due to long periods of stability (Babitha, 2009). Thus these drawbacks of synthetic color have increased the global demand for natural pigments (Manikprabhu and Lingappa, 2013 The main sources for natural pigments are plants or microorganisms, but the plant pigments has many drawbacks such as non-availability throughout the year and pigment stability , solubility and large scale plant use may lead to loss of valuable species. Due to this reason the next readily available natural sources for pigments are microorganisms like fungi and bacteria(Arulselvi et al., 2014).