Plant chitinases, a class of glycosyl hydrolases, participate in various aspects of normal plant growth and development, including cell wall metabolism and disease resistance. The rice (Oryza sativa) genome encodes 37 putative chitinases and chitinase-like proteins. However, none of them has been characterized at the genetic level. In this study, we report the isolation of a brittle culm mutant...

The ability of marine bacteria to adhere to detrital particulate organic matter and rapidly switch on metabolic genes in an effort to reproduce is an important response for bacterial survival in the pelagic marine environment. The goal of this investigation was to evaluate the relationship between chitinolytic gene expression and extracellular chitinase activity in individual cells of the marin...

The gastrointestinal tract of animals is adapted to their primary source of food to optimize resource use and energy intake. Temperate bat species mainly feed on arthropods. These contain the energy-rich carbohydrate chitin, which is indigestible for the endogenous enzymes of a typical mammalian gastrointestinal tract. However, the gastrointestinal tract of bat species should be adapted to thei...

Chitin is an abundant biopolymer whose degradation is mediated primarily by bacterial chitinases. We developed a degenerate PCR primer set to amplify a approximately 900-bp fragment of family 18, group I chitinase genes and used it to retrieve these gene fragments from environmental samples. Clone libraries of presumptive chitinase genes were created for nine water and six sediment samples from...

The present investigation highlights the process parameters influencing the submerged fermentation of chitinase by Bacillus pumilus JUBCH08, purification and characterization of the enzyme and determination of antagonistic activity of the bacterium against Fusarium oxysporum. Medium supplemented with 0.5 % chitin and peptone, at initial pH 8.0, when incubated at 35 °C for 72 h favored highest c...

A cDNA encoding a chitinase-related receptor-like kinase, designated CHRK1, was isolated from tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum). The C-terminal kinase domain (KD) of CHRK1 contained all of the conserved amino acids of serine/threonine protein kinases. The putative extracellular domain was closely related to the class V chitinase of tobacco and to microbial chitinases. CHRK1 mRNA accumulation was stro...

Plant chitinases, a class of glycosyl hydrolases, participate in various aspects of normal plant growth and development, including cell wall metabolism and disease resistance. The rice (Oryza sativa) genome encodes 37 putative chitinases and chitinase-like proteins. However, none of them has been characterized at the genetic level. In this study, we report the isolation of a brittle culm mutant...

To carry out a genetic analysis of the degradation and utilization of chitin by Serratia marcescens 2170, various Tn5 insertion mutants with characteristic defects in chitinase production were isolated and partially characterized. Prior to the isolation of the mutants, proteins secreted into culture medium in the presence of chitin were analyzed. Four chitinases, A, B, C1, and C2, among other p...

A cluster of three closely linked chitinase genes organized in the order chiA, chiB and chiC, with the same transcriptional direction, and two unlinked genes, chiP and chiQ, involved in chitin degradation in Pseudoalteromnas sp. strain S91 were cloned, sequenced and characterized. The deduced amino acid sequences revealed that ChiA, ChiB and ChiC exhibited similarities to chitinases belonging t...

We examined the mechanism of attachment of the marine bacterium Vibrio harveyi to chitin. Wheat germ agglutinin and chitinase bind to chitin and competitively inhibited the attachment of V. harveyi to chitin, but not to cellulose. Bovine serum albumin and cellulase do not bind to chitin and had no effect on bacterial attachment to chitin. These data suggest that this bacterium recognizes specif...