Chitin binding activity of moringa seed resistant protein (MSRP) isolated from defatted moringa seed flour was investigated in the present study "Characterization of soluble dietary fiber from Moringa oleifera seeds and its immunomodulatory effects" (S. Anudeep, V.K. Prasanna, S.M. Adya, C. Radha, 2016) [1]. The assay reaction mixture contained 0.4 mg/ml of MSRP and different amounts (20-100 mg...

Chitin is produced in large amounts by fungi, insects, and other organisms and has been implicated in the pathogenesis of asthma. Airway epithelial cells are in direct contact with environmental particles and serve as the first line of defense against inhaled allergens and pathogens. The potential contributions of airway epithelial cells to chitin-induced asthma remain poorly understood. We hyp...

Chitin is a minor but essential component of the Saccharomyces cerevisiae cell wall. In wild-type, chitin synthase II is required for the formation of primary septa and chitin synthase III (CSIII) is not essential. However, in chs2 mutants CSIII becomes essential for the formation of aberrant septa. We examined which of two CSIII functions, the formation of a chitin ring at bud emergence or of ...

The conventional methods used to evaluate chitin content in fungi, such as biochemical assessment of glucosamine release after acid hydrolysis or epifluorescence microscopy, are low throughput, laborious, time-consuming, and cannot evaluate a large number of cells. We developed a flow cytometric assay, efficient, and fast, based on Calcofluor White staining to measure chitin content in yeast ce...

Chitin is one of the most important biopolymers in nature. It is mainly produced by fungi, arthropods and nematodes. In insects, it functions as scaffold material, supporting the cuticles of the epidermis and trachea as well as the peritrophic matrices lining the gut epithelium. Insect growth and morphogenesis are strictly dependent on the capability to remodel chitin-containing structures. For...

Chitin is an essential part of the carbohydrate skeleton of the fungal cell wall and is a molecule that is not represented in humans and other vertebrates. Complex regulatory mechanisms enable chitin to be positioned at specific sites throughout the cell cycle to maintain the overall strength of the wall and enable rapid, life-saving modifications to be made under cell wall stress conditions. C...

In this study, we used Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR), elemental analysis (EA), thermogravimetric analysis (TGA), X-ray diffractometry (XRD), and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) to investigate chitin structure isolated from both sexes of four grasshopper species. FT-IR, EA, XRD, and TGA showed that the chitin was in the alpha form. With respect to gender, two main difference...

Chitin is an essential component of the fungal cell wall and its synthesis is under tight spatial and temporal regulation. The fungal human pathogen Candida albicans has a four member chitin synthase gene family comprising of CHS1 (class II), CHS2 (class I), CHS3 (class IV) and CHS8 (class I). LacZ reporters were fused to each CHS promoter to examine the transcriptional regulation of chitin syn...

a soil bacterium capable of degrading chitin on chitin agar plates was isolated and identified as bacillus pumilus isolate u5 on the basis of 16s rdna sequence analysis. in order to optimize culture conditions for chitinase production by this bacterium, a two step approach was employed. first, the effects of several medium components were studied using the plackett-burman design. among various ...

When macrophages phagocytose chitin (N-acetyl-d-glucosamine polymer) microparticles, mitogen-activated protein kinases (MAPK) are immediately activated, followed by the release of Th1 cytokines, but not IL-10. To determine whether phagocytosis and macrophage activation in response to chitin microparticles are dependent on membrane cholesterol, RAW264.7 macrophages were treated with methyl-beta-...