Red Pigment Research Paper

Customarily, the manufactured food will be imposed with colorants to amplify its commercial values. According to Babitha et al. (2006), the consumption on the product will be increased by manipulating typical human behavioral response towards appealing colours. Recently, the application of natural colour additives in food technology has become alternatively relevant since the usage of artificial colour additives are suggested to cause several diseases and harmful effects to health (Velmurugan et al., 2010).

Natural pigments are coloured compounds extracted from living organism (e.g. plant, animal, fungus, etc.). However, the production of natural pigments using microorganisms raised a significant attention due to certain advantages, such

The typical colours of Monascus sp. pigments are red, yellow and orange (Arunachalam and Narmadhapriya, 2011). However, red pigment is considered as the most important pigment used in industry (Carvalho et al., 2007; Mukherjee and Singh, 2011; Pattanagul et al., 2007).

Red yeast rice produce high pigment yield compared to other substrate, contradicting cassava bagasse which is not preferred as it produce low pigment yield (Carvalho et al., 2006). Solid state fermentation was chosen in this study due to its relatively higher pigment productivity compared to the submerged culture (Carvalho et al., 2006; Soccol and Vandenberghe, 2003). Commonly in producing a substance of biological origin, downstream processing is the most cost consuming phase (e.g., labours, equipments, chemicals, etc.). Contextually, for efficient pigment production to occur, the most relevant extraction methods are necessarily to be determined prior any large scale production take

The solvent was mixed in different flask. The solvent extraction was performed for 24 hours at room temperature.

2.4.2 Solvent ratio and Agitation extraction
Seven gram of dried fermented rice was placed in 250 mL Erlenmeyer flasks. Ethanol 60% resulted in better pigment extraction as discussed elsewhere in the paper (Figure 1). Dried fermented rice was mixed with 60% ethanol for 24 hours at room temperature. The extraction was performed in an incubator shaker at 110 rpm. Using fixed solvent of 60% ethanol and fixed rotational speed of 110 rpm, different ratio of dried fermented to solvent 1:2, 1:3, 1:4, 1:5, and 1:6 (g/ml) were evaluated in different flask.

In a separate experiment, four individual Erlenmeyer flasks containing 7 g of dried fermented rice was mixed with 60% ethanol in a ratio of 1:2 (g/ml). The Erlenmeyer flasks were exposed to four different agitation speeds of 100 rpm, 150 rpm, 200 rpm and 250 rpm, separately for 24 h.

2.4.3 Ultrasonic