J. Gen. Appl. Microbiol., 52, 201–207 (2006)

Demand for natural instead of synthetic pigments for coloring fabrics, foods and cosmetics is increasing. Unlike pigments that are synthetic, those from natural sources allow subtle differences in tone because such pigments generally comprise various color components. Microbes have recently received focus as sources of natural pigments (Mapari et al., 2005). Many fungal species produce pigments. Monascus fungi (Shin et al., 1998; Tseng et al., 2000) produce red or yellow pigments that are used as food colorants. Hahella produces red, prodigiosin (Nakashima et al., 2005), Ashbya produces yellow riboflavin (Stahmenn et al., 2001), Phoma produces orange aza-anthraquinone (Birch et al., 1964) and Chromobacterium produces blue violacein (Rettori and Durán, 1998). We discovered a fungus that produces magenta pigment. We found that the produced colors were magenta, pink or green depending on the type of fiber added to the culture medium. These findings indicated that various fibers influence the metabolic pathways involved in the production of secondary pigment metabolites.