Curcumin, the active, light sensitive agent, found in significant amounts in Curcuma longa L, is a potential therapeutic agent, possessing various pharmaceutical and industrial uses. The present extraction techniques, that are in application for many decades suffer from many economical and environmental demerits. This work is a prospective and noteworthy step towards conquering those disadvantages by means of optimizing the extraction process parameters and developing an energy efficient, environment friendly and economical process. In this study, various organic solvents were tested for their ability of curcumin extraction an concluded that acetone is most efficient. The process parameters like time, temperature and particle size were investigated and the minimum volume and concentration of solvent required were determined. Three potential pre-treatment process were analyzed for their capability to effectively distort the turmeric structure and aid in increasing the overall efficiency of the process. It was found that, employment of a mechanical distortion method by microwave assistance, and further followed by chemical disintegration, by means of enzymatic treatment, resulted in high attainable efficiency.

Biosorption of heavy metals by bacteria is one such effective and eco-friendly method being adopted frequently for environmental applications. The present work reveals the comparative adsorption capacity of Copper and Chromium on the surface of Bacillus Cereus, aerobic, gram positive bacteria. Hexavalent chromium is toxic, non-biodegradable and persistent in nature, Copper is equally toxic when exceeds the permissible limit. Batch experimental studies were conducted in shake flask method to optimize the parameters such as pH, Reaction time, Biosorbent dose and Initial metal concentration. One of four parameters was varied keeping the other three constants and the optimum reaction time was found to be 24 hours. At an Optimum pH level of 7±2 with the optimum initial metal concentration of 100ppm the biosorption capacity was found to be 54 percent and 60 percent for Copper and Chromium respectively.