Team:ECUST China/Introduction

Introduction
What is phycocyanin?

Phycocyanin is a rare natural blue pigment. Compared with gardenia blue, which is also a natural pigment, phycocyanin is rich in nutrients and has a variety of physiological functions such as antioxidant, anti-tumor and anti-inflammatory.

In 1986, Developed by Japan Kangpai AIDS Research Institute and produced by CONFIDENCE Algae Nutrition Food Co., LTD., Kangpai (Confident) phycocyanin was used as rehabilitation medicine and nutrition food for cancer patients and leukemia patients, and had achieved outstanding therapeutic effect.

Phycocyanin has a broad development and application prospect and has great value in food, medicine, cosmetics and other fields. According to literature reports, edible phycocyanin contains 8 kinds of essential amino acids for human body, which is consistent with the popular concept of big health at present, and has a strong market potential.

Limitation of current’s phycocyanin

Currently, the foods added with phycocyanin in the market mainly include yogurt, beer, bread, etc., but as a natural pigment the use of phycocyanin is still limited and the main obstacles are as follows:

● Firstly, the high production cost. At present, phycocyanin production mainly relies on physicochemical method to extract from algae. This method is time-consuming, lengthy and power consuming, and about 50-90% of the cost comes from purification.

● Secondary, the stability in the processing process. Phycocyanin is sensitive to heat and will fading during the baking process with high temperature which will cause waste and economic losses.

● Thirdly, although phycocyanin has been widely accepted in many foreign countries and has gotten widely used. However, general public’s understanding towards phycocyanin in our country is limited. Phycocyanin occupies low market shares and are added to limited products on the China’s market currently.

Advancement of our phycocyanin

The experiment modifies yeast to produce phycocyanin because yeast is an important raw material in food baking. With our modified yeast, we can produce phycocyanin in the process of fermentation.What’s more, yeast is one kind of important unicellular model organism which grows fast and is easy to cultivate. Once the phycocyanin yeast is synthesized, it would greatly reduce the production cost of phycocyanin.

Our project carried on the innovation in terms of production technology. Different from the current traditional separation and purification method, the heat-resistant source gene fragment is inserted into the yeast through plasmids which gives the phycocyanin an important character that it can resist the temperature in baking and pasteurization.

In the project, we learned from our questionnaires that people actually have a high acceptance of phycocyanin, and the team will also carry out some popular science publicity about phycocyanin to prepare for the subsequent product promotion.