Study of Chitinase and Chitinolytic Activity of Lactobacillus Strains

The increasing consumer demand for less processed and more natural food products - while improving those products’ quality, safety, and shelf-life – has raised the necessity of chemical preservative replacement. Biopreservation refers to extended storage life and enhanced safety of foods using the natural microflora and (or) their antibacterial products. Chitinolytic enzymes are of biotechnological interest, since their substrate, chitin, is a major structural component of the cell wall of fungi, which are the main cause of the spoilage of food and raw plant material. Among the several organisms, many bacteria produce chitinolytic enzymes, however, this behaviour is not general. The chitinase activity of the lactic acid bacteria is scarcely known and studied. The aim of the present study was to select Lactobacillus strains that have genes encoding chitinase, furthermore, to detect expressed enzymes and to characterise their chitinase activity. Taking into consideration the importance of chitin-bindig proteins (CBPs) in the chitinase activity, CBPs were also examined. Five Lactobacillus strains out of 43 strains from 12 different species were selected by their chitinase coding gene. The presence of the chitinase and chitin-biding protein production were confirmed, however, no chitinolytic activity has been identified

Infrared Study of Solvent-Solute Interactions of 1-Substituted 2-Pyrrolidinones and Related Compounds

The wavenumbers of the carbonyl stretching vibrations of 2-pyrrolidinone (P), 1-methyl-2-pyrrolidinone (MP), 1-isopropyl-2-pyrrolidinone (IPP), 1-(2-hydroxyethyl)-2-pyrrolidinone (HEP), 2-oxobenzothiazole (OBT), and 3-octyl-2-oxobenzothiazole (OOBT) were measured in n-hexane/CDCl3, acetonitrile/D2O, methanol/D2O, and 2-butoxyethanol/D2O mixtures and compared with similar data for 1-cyclohexyl-2-pyrrolidinone (CHP) and dimethylacetamide (DMA). The dependencies of the wavenumbers on the mole fraction of the less polar cosolvent in binary mixtures allow a distinction and assignment of all species resulting from weak solute-solvent and solute-solute interactions. The slopes of the dependencies of the wavenumbers on the mole fraction for similar intermolecular species in n-hexane/CDCl3 mixtures correlate well with the relative hydrogen bond basicities (i.e. hydrogen bonding abilities with phenol) and reveal that the solvent sensitivities significantly depend on the steric requirements in the vicinity of the C=O group. On the other hand, the slopes of similar dependencies in acetonitrile/D2O mixtures are proportional to the electron donating effects of alkyl groups attached to the nitrogen atom of the pyrrolidinone ring. In the case of mixtures formed by two strongly hydrogen bonding cosolvents (alcohols/D2O), a competitive equilibrium occurs between the hydrogen bonding tendency of both cosolvents and 1-substituted 2-pyrrolidinones. In solutions of 1-substituted 2-pyrrolidinones in water-rich 2-butoxyethanol/D2O mixtures, microheterogeneous domains occur before classic mixtures of two polar liquids are formed.