Si Young Ha
Gyeongsang National University, South Korea
Title: Effects of LED on mycelium weight and cordycepin content of submerged cultured vegetable worms (Cordyceps militaris)
Biography
Biography: Si Young Ha
Abstract
More recently, Cordyceps militaris has been widely used due to its folkloric activities, which are not based on scientific studies. Cordycepin (3′-deoxyadenosine), a metabolite of C. militaris, has been showed to inhibit the growth of various tumor cells. Previous work reported the isolation of cordycepin from liquid culture medium of C. militaris and its pharmacological functions. But, as far as we know, there is limited knowledge about the light emitting diode (LED) condition for cordycepin production by C. militaris. In this paper, the effects of LED were focused in order to improve the cordycepin production by submerged cultivation of C. militaris. For this experiment, mycelial cultivation was performed in a shaking incubator at 24°C, 100 RPM for 5 days and the medium was sabouraud dextrose broth (pH 5.6). The red, green and blue were used for the LED and dark culture and fluorescent lamp were used as the control. This results, C. militaris showed the highest mycelial weight when green light was irradiated on the other hand, when irradiated with blue light, the content of cordycepin is about 4 times higher than that of fluorescent lamp in the cultures of C. militaris. In addition, the highest content of cordycepin was observed when irradiated for 6 h/day for 3 days. Interestingly, mycelial weight and cordycepin content were inversely related. The information obtained is considered fundamental and useful to the development of C. militaris cultivation process for efficient production of cordycepin on a large scale.