发布: 2018年04月20日第8卷第8期 DOI: 10.21769/BioProtoc.2666 浏览次数: 7421
评审: Anonymous reviewer(s)
Abstract
The marine beta-glucan laminarin is an abundant storage polysaccharide in microalgae. High production rates and rapid digestion by heterotrophic bacteria turn laminarin into an ideal carbon and energy source, and it is therefore a key player in the marine carbon cycle. As a main storage glucan laminarin also plays a central role in the energy metabolism of the microalgae (Percival and Ross, 1951; Myklestad, 1974; Painter, 1983). We take advantage of enzymes that digest laminarin selectively and can thereby quantify only this polysaccharide in environmental samples. These enzymes hydrolyze laminarin into glucose and oligosaccharides, which are measured with a standard reducing sugar assay to obtain the laminarin concentration. Prior to this assay, the three enzymes need to be produced via heterologous expression and purification. The assay can be used to monitor laminarin concentrations in environmental microalgae, which were concentrated from seawater by filtering, or in samples derived from algal lab cultures.
Keywords: Algae (藻类)Background
Marine polysaccharides play an important role in the marine carbon cycle and are a major part of the physiology of phytoplankton, but are severely understudied. For decades, the agro-food industry has been using ready-to-use kits based on enzymatic assays to analyse a wide range of different polysaccharides in their processes (Whitaker, 1974). These fast, robust and specific enzyme based methods assess polysaccharides originating from land-based plants, i.e., starch, as they are widely used in food, feed and other industrial applications (Brunt et al., 1998). However, similar assays for marine polysaccharides are still lacking. Inspired by the idea of using enzymes for polysaccharide quantification in algae, we developed an enzyme-based method to quantify the ecologically relevant beta-glucan laminarin, also known as chrysolaminarin, in diatoms and other microalgae.
The three glycoside hydrolases (GH) for this application are from Formosa spp. and they were characterized as follows: FbGH30 is an exo-acting β-1,6-glucanase of the GH30 family, specifically hydrolysing the β-1,6-linked glucose monomer branches attached to the laminarin backbone; and FaGH17A and FbGH17A are two endo-acting β-1,3-glucanases of the GH family 17, which acts specifically on the β-1,3-linked laminarin backbone (Becker et al., 2017)
This method enables the quantification of laminarin in crude substrate mixtures, without the need for purification of the laminarin. This enzymatic method is fast, does not require sophisticated instruments, the enzymes are stereospecific and they selectively cleave laminarin into glucose and oligosaccharides, which can be quantified with a common reducing sugar assay. The method can be easily applied in fieldwork. The assay itself comprises only the three steps of extraction, hydrolysis and the reducing sugar assay (Figure 1). It can be done within only a few hours. The limit of detection (LOD) of the assay is at 1.5 µg/ml. The three enzymes need to be produced only once and can be stored for years. After their production and purification, one has enough material to analyse thousands of samples. We decided to include the plasmid transformation and recombinant enzyme production part into the protocol, since we consider these steps feasible to be done by marine labs with less experience in biotechnology.
Figure 1. Schematic protocol after the production of the enzymes. A brief outline of the three main steps and their approximate duration.
Materials and Reagents
Equipment
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文章信息
版权信息
© 2018 The Authors; exclusive licensee Bio-protocol LLC.
如何引用
Becker, S. and Hehemann, J. (2018). Laminarin Quantification in Microalgae with Enzymes from Marine Microbes. Bio-protocol 8(8): e2666. DOI: 10.21769/BioProtoc.2666.
分类
生物化学 > 糖类 > 昆布多糖
微生物学 > 微生物生物化学 > 糖类
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