Kinetics Properties of Marine Chitinase from Novel Red Sea Strain of Bacillus

An aerobic Gram variable rod shaped polarly flagellated marine bacterium abbreviated R2 attracted our attention not by its hyper chitinolytic activity but also by its multiple enzymes production (protease, gelatinase, lipase, amylase, dextranase,alginase, arabinase, agarase, etc.). This bacterial isolate was selected and identified using conventional methods as well as 16S rRNA technique and submitted in the Gen Bank sequence database as Bacillus sp. R2 with a given accession number DQ 923161. Its purified chitinase showed a molecular weight of 41.68 KDa. Kinetics study revealed that the chitinase exhibited Km, Vmax and Kcat values of 6.971 mg/ml, 69.63 U/ml and 1.815 μcatal for colloidal chitin, 3.334 mg/ml, 83.32 U/ml and 2.172 μcatal for squid chitin respectively. Furthermore the enzyme catalytic efficiency (Kcat/Km) was estimated to be 0.260 and 0.651 μM P.min-1mol-1mg-1S toward colloidal chitin and squid chitin, respectively. This is the first contribution about marine chitinase kinetics study from novel gram variable Bacillus isolated from the Red sea.