Enhancement of lutein content in Linn. By solid-state fermentation with species.

Linn contains the highest quantity of lutein in the orange variety of flowers. It has several benefits like; it protects the eyes from free radicals associated with UV rays on the eye retina. In the present work, we checked the enhancement of lutein content in flowers by solid-state fermentation examined by using four different species of ( spp. casei, and ). These microorganisms were isolated and allowed to ferment over the fresh (FC) and dried (DC) petals of for 10 days in the incubator. The fermented and non-fermented petals were extracted by the hexane extraction method and the presence of lutein was confirmed by HPLC technique, using a reversed-phase C18 column and gradient elution with a mobile phase composed of acetonitrile and methanol (40:60), flow rate of 1.0 ml/min and the UV detection at 446 nm. The highest amount of lutein (9.92 mg/g) was found in dried orange variety petals fermented by . However, the orange variety of FC petals showed the highest concentration (40.66 mg/g) in . Experiment results concluded that 1 kg of FC petals contains 4.0% of lutein fermented by and 1 kg of DC petals contains 0.99% of lutein fermented by compared with non-fermented and commercial lutein. The non-fermented FC and DC orange flowers contain 1.1% and 0.4% of lutein and commercial lutein contains 0.2%. The process mentioned above was also carried out using ethanol as the solvent for extraction, which showed satisfactory yield, 1 kg of fresh flowers of contains 0.43% of lutein fermented by and 1 kg of DC contain 0.52% of lutein fermented by .