Kojic Acid Research Paper

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Properties of Kojic acid

Kojic acid has a Chemical formula of C6H6O4, with a molar mass of 142.11 g/ mol, appears as white prismatic or needle shaped structure,with a melting point of 152 to 155 °C and a density of 1.580 mg/cm3 . It is weakly acidic in nature with a pKa value of 9.40.

4.5.3.1 Chemical properties
Kojic acid is soluble in polar substances like water, ethanol, ethyl acetate etc. On the contrary, kojic acid is very less soluble in chloroform, ether etc . It has multifunctional reactive Pyrone,which is is reactive at every position on a ring. Moreover at 5th carbon position hydroxyl (OH-) acts as weak acid, which is capable to form salts with few metals such as Sodium, Zinc, Copper etc which make it more reactive (Crueger and …show more content…

In medical field, kojic acid is used as anti-microbial agents. In chemical industries it has been successfully used to make azodyes and some other important and biodegradable compounds. In the food industries, it is used as anti-melanosis (i.e) blackening agents for agricultural products. Since India is basically an agricultural country, the use of kojic acid will be economically important in the post harvest process. Kojic acid possess the capacity to tie up with other chemicals easily and form the derivatives make its usage more visible in chemical and pharmaceutical industry. Since it is freely soluble in polar compounds such as water, ethanol, acetone, kojic acid was profitably employed for the preparation more than one hundred and fifty various kojic acid derivatives, many of them even represented new chemical compounds which open the doors for still more new variety of drugs. Kojic acid is easily biodegradable hence has got number of usages in food, cosmetic and pharmaceutical industry. It is an iron and copper chelator capable of preventing oxidation, photo damage, hyperpigmentation and skin wrinkling (Mitani et al 2001, Briganti et al 2003). Kojic acid also possess potent biological activities such as reducing mustard toxicity (Smith and Lindsay 2001), potential to be used in therapeutic drugs (Sudhir et al 2005) inducing macrophage activation (Rodrigues et al 2011) and metal chelating agent (Stenson and Cioffi 2007). Potential industrial application of kojic acid have been reported by ( Mohamad et al 2010). KA esters such as dipalmitate have been commercialised for cosmetic and skin health care applications (Al-Edresi and Baie

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