ABSTRACT
Restrictions imposed on artificial food colorants have resulted in
extensive research on natural pigments in recent years. Among the
natural colorants, anthocyanins are the largest group of water-soluble
pigments in the plant kingdom. The young and emerging purple
coloured leaves of sweet potato leaves has just been known as a
potential source of anthocyanin due to its higher stability because of its
acylation compared to the ones obtained from other sources. For a
commercial production process, it is important to shorten the extraction
time. Therefore, the present study was undertaken to optimize the
conditions for the extraction of anthocyanin from the young and
emerging purple leaves of sweet potato using different solvent systems,
and also to purify and fractionate the pigments using Amberlite XAD-7
and Sephadex LH-20. The spectral properties of the pigments are also
studied. These results may be used for the further optimization studies
to design a commercial production of anthocyanins from sweet potato