Fungal Production of Vitamins and Their Food Industrial Applications

Vitamins are micro-nutrients that play an essential role to maintain proper functioning of metabolism in human health. Vitamins demand is increasing globally in food, pharmaceutical, cosmetics and feed industries. Moreover, the consumer preferences moving towards vitamin supplements are a crucial trend in the growth of vitamins supplement market. Fruits and vegetable are a good source of vitamins but are present in very less quantity. So, there is a need to generate vitamins from other bio-resources, and among all these, the microbial sources open up a huge scope for the production of vitamins, industrially. Many microorganisms can produce vitamins in their natural metabolic pathways, such as bacteria, fungi and algae. Currently, metabolic engineering also came into the light to customize the genome of fungal cell factories to accelerate the generation of vitamins with bio-safe nature. This book chapter elaborates the fungal production of different vitamins, their market scenario and technological and regulatory challenges to the food industry.