This study was undertaken to investigate the influence of cultural conditions on the production of antibacterial red pigment by Serratia marcescens IBRL USM 84. This isolate exhibited maximal antibacterial red pigment production of 37.17 U/ml which was achieved at 40 hours of cultivation time when cultivated in marine broth with improved conditions, including the addition of 0.2% (w/v) of agar, cultivation temperature at 25°C, initial medium pH of 7, agitated at 150 rpm and 2% inoculum size (1×109 cells/ml). There was an increment of 164% of red pigment production after improvement compared to before improvement of cultural conditions. The results suggested different cultural conditions have a significant impact on the secondary metabolite production by the bacterium to gain a high yield.
Serratia marcescens, antibiotic, red pigment, marine microorganism
© The Author(s) 2014. Open Access. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License which permits unrestricted use, sharing, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.