%0 Journal Article
%T Cloning and overexpression of a new chitosanase gene from Penicillium sp. D-1
%A Xu-Fen Zhu
%A Hai-Qin Tan
%A Chu Zhu
%A Li Liao
%A Xin-Qi Zhang
%A Min Wu
%J AMB Express
%D 2012
%I Springer
%R 10.1186/2191-0855-2-13
%X The GenBank/EMBL/DDBJ accession numbers for the 18S rRNA gene and chitosanase gene of strain D-1 are JF950269 and JF950270, respectively.Cellulose, chitin, and chitosan are all composed of ¦Â-1,4-linked glucopyranoses, and the difference is in functional groups at the C-2 positions of their constituent sugars, i.e., the hydroxyl, acetamido, and amino groups, respectively. Chitin is a linear homopolymer composed of ¦Â-(1,4)-N-acetyl-D-glucosamine (GlcNAc), while chitosan is a polycationic carbohydrate consisting of ¦Â-(1,4) linked D-glucosamine (GlcN) residues and derived from chitin by partial or complete deacetylation. Chitosan could be found only in fungi cell wall and insect cuticle of limited groups in nature. Chitosan and the products derived from its hydrolysis have attracted much attention because of their interesting biological properties, such as the antibacterial, antifungal and antitumor functions, and thus have been used in agriculture, food and pharmaceutical industries (Somashekar and Joseph 1996; Chiang et al. 2003).Chitosanase (EC 3.2.1.132) is a member of glycosyl hydrolase families acting on the ¦Â-1,4-glycosidic linkage of chitosan to release chito-oligosaccharides. Chitosanase is regarded to be important in carbon and nitrogen recycles that extensively occur in nature, and useful in the preparation of biofunctional chitooligosaccharides. It has been concluded that chitosanases can hydrolyze GlcN-GlcN, GlcN-GlcNAc and GlcNAc-GlcN bonds except GlcNAc-GlcNAc bond (Fukamizo et al. 1994; Masson et al. 1994).Chitosanases have been found from many kinds of organisms, such as bacteria (Somashekar and Joseph 1996; Zhang et al. 2001; Kimoto et al. 2002; Gupta et al. 2010), fungi (Jung et al. 2006; Cheng et al. 2006), viruses (Sun et al. 1999) and plants. Based on amino acid sequence similarity (Henrissat and Davies 1997), chitosanases can be grouped into five glycosyl hydrolase (GH) families, i.e. GH5, GH8, GH46, GH75 and GH80 (http://www.cazy.org/Glycoside-Hy
%K Chitosanase
%K Penicillium sp.
%K Gene cloning
%K Expression
%U http://www.amb-express.com/content/2/1/13