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The production of functional foods providing health benefit is one of the fast growing fields in the food industry. Mannitol as GRAS (generally recognized as safe) is a functional food. Mannitol is about 70% as sweet as sucrose and slowly and incompletely absorbed from the intestine, suppling only about one-half energy value of glucose. Commercially, the mannitol is synthesized by catalytic or electrochemical reduction of glucose. However, as strong demand for natural products increased, biological techniques have been developed for mannitol production. The object of this study was to determine the optimum conditions of mannitol fermentation by Leuconostoc mesenteroides sp. strain JFY isolated from fermented vegetables. The processes parameters such as pH, temperature, yeast extract concentration, and fructose concentration were optimized. The chosen ranges were 4.5 to 7.5 for pH, 22 to 34℃ for temperature, 0.05 to 2.0% for yeast extract. and 5 to 350 g/L for fructose. The mineral medium used consisted of 3.0 g KH₂PO₄, 0.01 g FeSO₄ㆍH₂O, 0.01 g MnSO₄ㆍ4H₂O, 0.2 g MgSO₄ㆍ7H₂O, 0.01 g NaCl, and 0.05 g CaCl₂per 1 liter of deionized water. The optimum values of pH, temperature, yeast extract, and fructose concentration were obtained at about pH 6.5, temperature 28℃, yeast extract 0.5% and fructose 30 g/L. At optimum condition, the production of mannitol amounted to 31.6 g/l. We hope that these findings are of particular importance for industrial application of mannitol production.
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