RESEARCH ARTICLE


Quantification of Lovastatin Produced by Monascus purpureus



A. Seenivasana, , Sathyanarayana N. Gummadib, Tapobrata Pandaa, *, Thomas Théodorec
a Biochemical Engineering Laboratory, Department of Chemical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, Chennai 600036, Tamil Nadu, India
b Department of Biotechnology, Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, Chennai – 600036, Tamil Nadu, India
c Department of Chemical Engineering, Siddaganga Institute of Technology, Tumkur - 572103, Karnataka, India
Present address: Department of Chemical Engineering, SSN College of Engineering, Chennai-603110, Tamil Nadu, India


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© 2015 Seenivasan et al.

open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode). This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

* Address correspondence to this author at the Department of Chemical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, Chennai 600036, Tamil Nadu, India; Tel: +91-44-2257 4160; E-mail: panda@iitm.ac.in


Abstract

Development of a novel method for the quantification of lovastatin is an interesting problem in the analytical field. In the literature, many reports use spectrophotometric method for the quantification of lovastatin. However, the analysis of fermentation broth containing lovastatin appears to be inaccurate using spectrophotometric method. Hence, the estimation of lovastatin produced by Monascus purpureus and pure lovastatin was attempted by UV-visible spectrophotometer as well as HPLC. It was observed that the analogues and/or intermediates of lovastatin synthesized in the fermentation broth and the products of fermentation caused superimposition effect on the absorption spectrum. Phosphate is a medium constituent for the production of lovastatin by the organism which contributed significantly to the superimposition of absorption spectrum. On the other hand, HPLC analysis consistently gave reliable results for the estimation of lovastatin under all the experimental conditions studied.

Keywords: Lovastatin, Monascus purpureus, spectrophotometry, HPLC.