Abstract:
Microbial metabolites have many important applications in pharmaceutical and
health-care industry. The products of microbial origin are usually produced by submerged
fermentation. The solid-state fermentation represents an alternative mode of fermentation,
which is increasingly being employed as an alternative to submerged fermentation for
metabolite production. The prospect of producing high-value product using low-value raw
material offers a substantial premium to switch to these technologies. The cost of statins
being one major factor, solid-state fermentation with agro-industrial residues as carbon,
nitrogen and support matrix, promises to substantially lower the cost of production. Hence,
newer approaches are required to exploit the agro-industrial residues for statin production.
The development of these technologies offers an opportunity to exploit low-cost substrates
without substantial investment in newer production methodologies. The emerging evidence
of beneficial effect of statins in applications other than lipid lowering such as in Alzheimer
disease, HIV, age-related dementia, and cancer chemotherapy makes it very important to
develop methods for economic production of statins.
