How is Phycocyanin Made?

 Phycocyanin is maybe a filamentous cyanobacterium that’s blue-green. It’s a pigment-protein complex from the phycobiliprotein family, which comes with allophycocyanin & phycoerythrin. It’s water-soluble.

Today we are going to discuss in detail that how Phycocyanin is made & how can we get benefit from using it within different applications.

Subunits of Phycobiliproteins

• There are two subunits of phycobiliproteins, “Alpha & beta”, which have the protein’s backbone where one or two tetrapyrrole chromophores are covalently bound.
• Phycocyanin is usually found in the cyanobacteria, which grow nearby hot weather because it can remain stable up to 70 °C, with light-absorbing behaviours at 20 and 70 °C.
• Thermophiles contain a bit different aminoalkanoic acid cycle making them stable under these higher conditions.
• The relative molecular mass is about 30,000 Da. 
• The stability of this protein invitro at these temperatures has been disported to be substantially lower.
• Photo-spectral inspection of the protein after 1 min exposure to 65 °C conditions during a purified state demonstrated a 50% loss of tertiary structure.

Making of Phycocyanin

• There are various methods for the production of Phycocyanin, including photoautotrophic, mixotrophic, heterotrophic, & recombinant production.

• Production of Phycocyanin happens where cyanobacteria spread in open ponds in tropical or either subtropical regions, whereas the production of 
• Mixotrophic algae grow in the culture where they have the source of organic carbon like glucose.
• Let us have a look at Subunits of Phycocyanin.