Lycopene mainly exist in the food, such as tomatoes, watermelon, grapefruit and guava. Content of lycopene in tomato and varies with the variety and maturity. The higher the maturity, the higher lycopene content. Fresh ripe tomato lycopene content in general is 31 ~ 37 mg/kg, often edible lycopene content in tomato juice/sauce according to different akba boswellic acid concentration and the producing method of about 93 ~ 290 mg/kg, higher lycopene content in fruit and guava (about 52 mg/kg), watermelon (about 45 mg/kg), grapefruit (14.2 mg/kg), etc. Carrots, pumpkins, lee, persimmon, peach, mango, pomegranate, grapes and other fruits and vegetables are available in a small amount of lycopene (0.1 ~ 1.5 mg/kg).

Lycopene extraction and separation methods mainly include organic solvent extraction, enzyme reaction method, microorganism fermentation, synthetic method, supercritical CO2 extraction, microwave method, etc. The carnosic acid price solvent extraction method is one of the most traditional (extraction), but the traditional
Leaching method exists leaching time is long, the intensity of labor, raw materials and processing energy consumption big, shortcomings and so on heat sensitive components easily damaged.

Chemical synthesis of lycopene contains a variety of isomer and impurities, banned use in health care products, market share; Natural extraction is limited by the raw material, and is difficult to further reduce the cost and production significantly influenced by season. Therefore, development of microbial fermentation production method glucosamine sulfate and chondroitin sulfate presents obvious advantages in recent years.

Lycopene is widely distributed in nature. At present, people gradually realized the synthetic pigment, the harm of human body from the natural plant extracting lycopene method become more common.

Principle: with KOH solution to the first alkaline saponification preprocessing of tomatoes, to remove most of the tomato fatty acid glyceride and all kinds of free fatty acid, and then use organic solvent extraction to get coarse extraction of lycopene, secondary saponification with crude extract
, make tomato cell fragments of proteins, fatty acid, fatty acid glyceride, apart form water-soluble saponification, release contains water insoluble lycopene, the high purity was obtained by recrystallization method of lycopene crystals.

Technological process: fresh tomatoes - cleaning - freeze-drying to organic solvent pretreatment, adding alkali saponification water bath to washed to neutral, mixed solvent extraction to get rich in lycopene extraction tannic acid astringent liquid, reduced pressure distillation concentration - tomato red oil dementholized resin -Eggplant red oil dementholized resin mixed with glycerol uniform to join the ethanol solution of KOH, sufficient to let stand after reaction with distilled water and mixed layers, oil phase water washing to neutral - again with ethanol to wash 2 ~ 3 times - processed oil resin in 50 ℃ dissolved in acetone, eliminated And room temperature placed 8 h, lycopene crystals.